In SEO & webmasters Word, people has question that why ranking goes down even after achieving 1st page ranking? So I feel to give in-depth article to have better idea that what might be the reasons that down the SEO ranking most of the times.
Are you losing your sales and slow down your business and everything is going bad because of your website ranking drops and searching the solutions then here is the most common issue for ranking drop I have seen.
Keyword Stuffing:
If you have create keyword stuffing in content that don’t create value to the user then it is just grab content, rather you have to focus on quality, valuable, creative content that gives value to the user. Need to place keyword in Meta as well as content but don’t do over keyword stuffing.
Duplicate/Thin Content:
Duplicate content that just created for particular keyword to rank but don’t pass value to the visitors e.g. your website on “blood pressure machine” so you may have all informative post like, benefits, brands, prices, comparisons, etc. but if you are just creating content like good blood pressure machine, nice blood pressure machine, superb blood pressure machine so this is just same thing use separate phrase in keyword and just creating unwanted pages to increase internal links.
If your website with low quality thin content then it may be affected by Google Panda which is google penalty for low quality content websites.
Over Internal Linking:
Over internal links with same anchor text also looks unnatural and especially that comes from topic not very close to point out the links, what I mean is if you are giving reference to inner page content that comes naturally that is good to pass the value to the user to check related content but if just for doing linking that don’t make any sense.
Unsteady Link Flow
The number of links pointing to your website is the link flow to your website and steady link flow means the number of link pointing to your website on regular space.
The ideal situation is to have steady space of backlink building profile that all looks natural but if it is going too much fluctuation then it looks spam. Increase links gradually is good rather build thousands of links in a week and nothing comes then after.
If you are building 5 links a week then also fine but you need to do it steadily. If you are building 500 links in a week and then stop suddenly so it looks totally artificially and down your ranking suddenly so what I recommend is to do steadily whether 5 links or 500 links.
If you are implementing link building campaign some time and stop some time that looks totally unnatural because, if your content is really informative then your site popularity need to increase gradually (not suddenly) so what happen if you are implementing fast link building approach that gives fast ranking but whenever you stop building links that down your ranking even more faster so keep building links whatever number you build.
Suddenly stop backlink building
As we have discuss in above point that the website need steady flow of links to look it natural but many times people are taking wrong decision when they are on 1st page rank and stop all the activities suddenly so what will happen is their ranking may stay for some time depend on the keyword & niche competition level and then after it start losing ranking and go down to nowhere and even I have seen many times in my 8 years’ experience that when we start work after ranking goes down then some time it looks even more unnatural and de-index the keyword even from ranking.
What I suggest here is to make habitual the Google your way and then take decision. Like, do regular works then make Google habitual about your site as an authentic and then keep doing it and then slow down the thing & build more & more quality works to create better authority in your niche but don’t recommend implementing fast link building or suddenly stopping all activities.
Anchor Text Variation
Google are now smarter than earlier days so if you build all of your links with your targeted keywords then you will get affected very soon but here you need to do vary the anchor text to looks more natural. More than 60% of time website is affected with over anchor text optimization.
You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org & ahrefs.com to check your anchor text variation to get idea that which anchor text is used most for your website linking to which page. Here is the question that how we know that website ranking is affected because of this reason? So what you have to look inside the result is to visit anchor text and see the number of links to your page. e.g. your website is www.yourwebsite.com and your first anchor text is “keyword 1” which has 575 links and second anchor text is “keyword 2” which has just 10 links which is huge difference that looks you are promoting your keyword 1 heavily & getting more links artificially and if that is the case with your website then it may be chances to affected by algorithm of over optimization which is known as Google penguin.
Google penguin is google new algorithm changes that aim to decrease ranking of website that manipulate the ranking with artificial linking to the website pages.
Same Strategy & Source of Links
If you are implementing same strategy heavily then it may create problems but here if you are getting from different domain, IP, sources that help better to keep away from any problems so kindly check your link building profile whether it is from same sources, domains? Then you have to work on that direction.
Many time strategy might be same but domain, IPs, anchor text, link to URL to the different pages are working but if everything is same then it might be problematic e.g. you are bookmarking your website to same bookmarking site is not recommended but some bookmarking to different bookmarking site with different URL & anchor text of your website then it looks good but still not too much in less time.
Competitors Are Performing Better
If everything at your end is perfect but your competitors are implementing better then you, then your ranking may down the position. If this is the case for your ranking drop then you need to implement better strategy to beat your competitors.
New search engine updates
Google is updating their algorithm very frequently to improve the result quality so you need to check whether your website is affected with any of Google’s new algorithm or what. Before 2011 low quality content even getting good ranking but after Google Panda many low quality site affected ranking and same way affected by Google Penguin for bad linking so in this way you need to check the latest Google search engine updates.
Removed Past Links
If your past backlinks are removed or deleted excessively then also it may drops ranking because each link passing link juice and page rank to the website and excessive number of backlink removed then it might drop the ranking.
Hidden Text
In earlier days people are using this technique to rank high but now a day Google able to detect hidden text and not consider good techniques so if you have this type of hidden text then remove it as soon as possible.
Server Down Problem
If your server has any problem and Google not able to access your website then they may send message in your webmasters and inform you about this problem. 1-2 times access problem may not down ranking but if this things continue for longer time then your ranking might be drop.
New site come fast & drop fast – Google Honeymoon
If you have new site and getting good ranking faster but that is not actually ranking because good are just passing to your website up for fresh content and if your website has not much back link support and enough value then it will down the ranking after some time and this is called Google honeymoon. If is because google like fresh & creative content for users so if you are comes up with news then Google pass above for some time as like news and then down if really not valuable.
Linking to penalized sites (bad neighborhood)
Kindly check your website outbound links to make sure that you are not linking to the bad links (which is penalized or banned). Few links may not create any problem but if you have lots of outbound links to low quality, penalized or banned website then it will create problem for your website ranking and this is called bad neighborhood. So check your outbound links and remove all bad or low quality sites link.
Backlinks from link farm pages
The page has 100s of links to other website without relevancy in topic, which is just created for links that called link farm. If your website has more number of links from this type of link farm pages then it may chances to down your website ranking. So check your website backlinks and remove all links from link farm pages.
Domain Farm
Person or company own many websites and cross linking each other heavily, Google consider this as link scheme that try to manipulate ranking so if this is the case then kindly check it and link wisely that looks natural not just for linking.
Checklist for Ranking Drop
Ask this entire question and check for your website and find the possible reason for ranking drop.
If you have any double or doesn’t able find proper solution then you can let me know I will be very happy to help with proper strategy.
