Gary Illyes, an Analyst at Google, has offered insights into investigating sudden keyword ranking drops. According to Illyes, it’s rare for a website to lose its Google ranking for a single keyword, and in most cases, competitors outrank the site. Investigative steps to find out the cause of a sudden ranking drop include checking for glitches, increased competition, technical issues, and link profile changes.
Investigating Keyword Ranking Issues
To investigate the cause of a sudden ranking drop, Illyes suggests checking if the issue is occurring globally. This can be done by asking friends in different locations to search for the keyword to determine if they can find the website. If a website’s disappearance for a specific keyword is limited to a particular region or individual users, it could be due to geo-targeting or personalization factors.
Illyes recommends using a virtual private network (VPN) to simulate searches from different countries to check if a website’s ranking is consistent across various locations. If a site is consistently absent from test searches, there might be a more significant problem.
Causes of Keyword Ranking Drops
Increased Competition
One of the potential causes of a sudden keyword ranking drop is increased competition. Competitors might have improved their content or implemented better SEO strategies, leading them to outrank the website for the targeted keyword. In this case, one should analyze competitor keywords, organic traffic, and top pages to discover their weak spots to overtake them in search and win new business.
Technical Issues
Crawling or indexing issues can cause a website to disappear from search results. This could be due to problems with the website’s robots.txt file, sitemap, site structure, or issues like broken links, duplicate content, or slow page load times. To investigate this, one can use Google Search Console to find and fix crawling and indexing issues.
Link Profile Changes
A sudden loss or gain of backlinks can affect a site’s rankings. This could be due to links from low-quality or spammy websites, a manual action taken by Google, or the loss of high-quality links. To investigate this, one should check the website’s link profile using a backlink analysis tool and disavow any toxic links.
Conclusion
In summary, sudden keyword ranking drops are rare, and in most cases, competitors outrank a website. Investigative steps to find out the cause of a sudden ranking drop include checking for glitches, increased competition, technical issues, and link profile changes. One should analyze competitor keywords, organic traffic, and top pages to discover their weak spots to overtake them in search and win new business. To investigate technical issues, one can use Google Search Console to find and fix crawling and indexing issues. To investigate link profile changes, one should check the website’s link profile using a backlink analysis tool and disavow any toxic links. if you have any of these issues check ups click the button below.
FAQs
1. What should I do if my website disappears from Google’s search results for one search term?
If your website disappears from Google’s search results for one search term, you should investigate the cause of the sudden ranking drop. Investigative steps to find out the cause include checking for glitches, increased competition, technical issues, and link profile changes.
2. How can I check if the issue is occurring globally?
You can check if the issue is occurring globally by asking friends in different locations to search for the keyword to determine if they can find the website. You can also use a virtual private network (VPN) to simulate searches from different countries.
3. What are some potential causes of a sudden keyword ranking drop?
Some potential causes of a sudden keyword ranking drop include increased competition, technical issues, and link profile changes
