It’s easy to find yourself in a panicked tailspin when you look at your ranking one day find you’ve taken a Google algorithm update hit and fallen off your treasured first page. It’s equally important not to have a knee-jerk reaction, rather to look at the situation calmly and analytically. First of all find out whether your site has been penalized, and a drop in rankings does not always answer this question. There are ways to determine if your site has suffered a Google penalty; first, compare your rankings to those of your closest competitors to determine whether they too have dropped or if it is only your firm’s site.
Your location can affect your rankings, so have others check your ranking as well. Make sure you stay up with Google’s Panda, Penguin and any other algorithm changes that are implemented. In general, issues that will result in being penalized include keyword stuffing, publishing duplicate content, paid links or questionable links. Not only should you keep up with algorithm updates, you should also keep a log of all changes made to your site. If you keep up with your analytics, your changes and Google’s changes you should be able to get a pretty fair idea of why your ratings have dropped.
Specific Issues to Take a Look At
In some instances a drop in page rank can be directly tied to one or more links to your site which have been removed and which formerly provided a substantial amount of PageRank. Since pages with low or medium-level PageRank tend to get most of their strength from a relatively small number of links, losing even one of them can cause significant impact. Next, ask yourself how “old” your site is. If it is less than six months old, it could have benefitted from Google’s help for new sites so they can be more easily found by users. Unfortunately that assistance generally only lasts about six month, and if you have not engaged in a solid link-building program during that time, you may find that the honeymoon is over and your rankings have taken a hit.
Violating Guidelines
The search engines are punishing offenders more quickly when their guidelines are obviously being violated. Hidden text is one trick that can get you in serious hot water with the search engines, causing your rankings to slide. Never hide any text by making it the same color as the background of your page and never stuff keywords on your page in a way that only search engines will see them. Both are serious no-no’s and you will pay for the violation. Next, ensure you have no “thin” content on your pages. Your goal is always first and foremost to offer exceptionally high-quality content which brings something of value to your readers. In other words it is both informative and compelling, and updated frequently.
Google has also begun penalizing sites which show a high ratio of advertising to content and those which show a significant amount of white space above the fold, meaning users must scroll down to get the most important information. Google’s goal is to enhance the user experience, and if they feel you are not assisting them with that goal your rankings will suffer. Never have multiple domain names which point to the same site—although it makes sense that this tactic would increase your rankings, quite the opposite is true and will trigger the search engine’s methods for filtering duplicate content.
Broken links, problems accessing your site, a site with a slow response, error codes and any form of duplicate content will also lead to a drop in page rankings so take the time to look carefully at your website and change any issue which is causing your site to suffer a drop in rankings.
