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6 Reasons Why Your SEO Ranking Drops

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Your website used to be at the top 5 rankings of the search results pages and you had lots of traffic and sales leads flowing in, even without any Search Engine Marketing (SEM) done. Then one fine day, your sales leads stop coming in from your website. You checked your analytics report and you are shocked to see a distinct loss in traffic. You check with your web designer and realize that your website link is gone from the first page of the search results pages.

What exactly happened?

Google ranking may drop suddenly for various reasons, but most of the time, it is due to your part of not putting in enough effort in your SEO strategy. Below are the common reasons why you experience a drop in rankings and what you can do in each case.

1. Duplicate Content On Your Website

Google doesn’t like duplicate content, period. So if you have been copying and pasting other website’s content without re-phasing or value-adding, your website will be penalized by Google. You can use Copyscape to check your website for duplicate content at a very affordable rate and see what are the affected pages. Then rewrite all the content for those pages and your ranking will jump back up soon later.

2. Low Quality Backlinks

If you have engaged a SEO company to work on your website, be sure to check if they have build low quality or “black-hat” backlinks for you. If so, it might be the reason why your website’s ranking is dropping. Get that company to remove those backlinks for you if possible. If not, your last resort is to inform Google that you is beyond your ability to remove those links on those “black-hat” sites through the Google Webmaster by disavowing those links.

3. Bad Hosting For Your Website

Fast page load is an important factor for Google to rank your website. If you have been using a low quality hosting service and is causing your website to load slowly, more visitors will tend to leave your site too. This is a signal to Google that they should rank other sites before yours. The solution is to get a hosting server in close proximity to your potential customers. If your website is catered for Singapore audience, be sure to use a hosting server that is based in Singapore.

4. New Website

If you have recently redesigned your website, you will see a drop in your rankings. This is because the search engines have to re-index your website’s content again. This is a common occurrence. The only way is to minimize the drop in rankings by having a proper 301 redirect plan in place.  As long as your new website is well optimized for SEO and continue on your other SEO strategy, your ranking will recover within one to two months.

5. Competitors Up Their SEO Strategy

SEO rankings are a zero sum game. For one website’s ranking to improve, other websites’ rankings have to drop. You have to outdo your competitors in order to stay on the first page. That’s why SEO company charges you monthly maintenance fee to maintain your ranking and not just a one-off deal. The only way to stay on top of your competitors is continual effort on your SEO strategy.

6. Google Just Updated Their Algorithm

There are thousands of search algorithm updates every year on Google. While most are minor updates which do not impact much, there are a few big updates like Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird which affect websites negatively that are not in compliance with their guidelines. To avoid being penalized by Google, be sure to follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines and only engage in “white-hat” SEO techniques.

These are some of the common reasons that caused your ranking to drop. Have you experienced a drop in rankings due to other reasons? Tell us in the comments section below.

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