Understanding Sudden Drops in Website Rankings

In the ever-changing world of SEO, ranking fluctuations are inevitable. When your website’s search engine rankings drop, it’s important to investigate the reasons behind it. Time is of the essence, and prolonged low rankings can translate to revenue loss. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to help diagnose and recover from ranking drops.

Broken Links

A good place to start is to check if your site has any broken links. This can be done through Google Search Console.

• To do this go to “Pages” under “Indexing” on the left-hand side.
• Scroll down to the bottom of this page and look for “Why pages aren’t indexed.”
• Click on “Not Found (404)”.

You’ll then see all the instances of 404 errors within your domain. These are the pages that Google can’t find, and users can’t see.

Interlinking

In the past, I have seen rankings drop because of extreme interlinking between two separate sites. It’s fine if the two domains have different goals. However, if you’re cluttering search engines with similar domains, there can be negative consequences.

For example, it is fine for a business to have a swimsuit domain and a sunscreen domain and interlink once. The problem would be if the swimsuit site also had a baby swimsuit site which interlinked on every page (with keyword anchor text). This can quickly be viewed with a review of the links on your site.

Reciprocal Linking

Excessive reciprocal link schemes are a thing of the past and can often hold back your rankings. Having many...