How to Deal with the SEO Rankings Drop

by | Apr 14, 2019 | SEO

BULLET POINTS

How to Deal with the SEO Rankings Drop

Grab a coffee, and ready to write some real shit. Are you ready, beautiful people?

When you are doing SEO for your website, what would you worry about every day? For me, the answer is the ranking getting dropped. Especially, the keywords you are always working on. You spend a lot of time on it and see the result gradually, but one day you notice the ranking of those keywords getting dropped dramatically. You would be like “dude, it is not fun at all. What is going on?”

This situation is happening all the time? Don’t be worry about too much because there is nothing you can do until you figure out the root causes with the corresponding solution.

I experienced this just in the last week, and my team was so worried about it. It is a good lesson for the team to be honest because the ranking game won’t always is on the way as you expected. The most important thing is your reaction to it.

So stop bullshitting, let’s dive into the topic for this week – “How to deal with the SEO rankings drop?”

 

First thing first, you have to be able to track the ranks

I don’t know how many projects or keywords you are working on it. If you are working on only like 10 keywords, the best way would be checking the ranks of these keywords manually and daily. If you are working in an in-house SEO team, you probably need to use some tools doing the job for you because the keywords you are working on would be thousands and always try to rank some new keywords. For me, I got used to using Ahrefs for a very time.

Only in this way, you can react to the rank dropping in the very first moment.

The second step, checking if you got a penalty or not

I have concluded a couple of points:

  1. Checking your organic traffic. If your website got a penalty from Google, your keywords would be dropped dramatically. If that isn’t happening which means your website doesn’t get penalties. What is really happened underneath is that Google has a better understanding of the page and thinks the page does not server the query pretty well.
  2. Search the brand name or the domain name on google. If the site is still there with a very high rank, which indicates that your site is ok right now. The rank dropping is only happening on a couple of specific pages. What you need to do would be figuring out the reasons for these specific pages instead of diving into a domain level.

The third step, dive into

The first situation- If the rank or the traffic dropping only happening on a couple of pages.

Once you find your site doesn’t get Google penalties, the following steps you could take to see why Google think the page is not matching to the keywords you are trying to rank.

Just remind you, there are a very long list of factors could affect ranks while there are always some you might need to check first.

  1. Testing the loading time

I guess you heard some people saying this all the time. When I was doing paid ads before, it does affect the conversion rate a lot. Same as SEO, onpage behavior is a key metric that Google takes into account for deciding the ranking. Here are a couple of tools you could use:

You could also go to your GA to see if the bounce rate dramatically increased on those rank dropped pages.

2. Meta descriptions and headlines

If you just changed your meta description or the headlines currently. It might be the reason. The biggest effects would be CTR in this case. If Google put your page in the top 1 place while people constantly click the pages on the second or third place. This is a signal that your page is matching to the search query pretty well. Take a look at what other search competitors are putting on their headlines and Meta description and understand what people are really looking for.

3. Indexed Shitty pages

It might be an accident that your include some shitty pages in the sitemap and request Google to crawl them. In this case, you need to go to the Google console and see which pages have been crawled and indexed. Download all the pages have been crawled and use ‘open multiple URL’ tool to check all the links one by one. After finding all the shitty page which have been indexed, you could remove those links through google console and create a robot.txt to stop crawling or indexing in the future. Even though your site doesn’t get a penalty, you have to make sure your site is all good for the avoidance of misunderstanding by Google.

The second situation – If you are 80% percent sure that the site got a penalty from Google

Note: I am not saying you can skip the 3 points mentioned above. If your site got a penalty, you probably need to pay more attention on the following.

4. Black-hat techniques.

I understand it is so hard to have a high rank on Google for some competitive keywords. It does not really depend on how much time you working on it because there is no way you can talk with Google’s algorithm and try to persuade Google to give your site a high rank. In this case, lots of SEOs are trying to cheat with Google, but the thing is you might be not that smart to do so. If you are still trying to use cloaking or sneaky redirecting, keywords stuffing, hidden text balalalalalalalalala. Man, you are out of date. You know what I am saying. This kinds of techniques were so f useful 10 years ago. The thing is that google’s algorithm is getting smarter and smarter in the last 10 years while you are staying at the same level as 10 years ago. This not gonna work, to be honest. (In other words, try to use smart way to cheat with Google. Xuuuuuuu, don’t tell Google, I just said that).

Back to the topic, making sure you are not doing some shitty job on cheating with Google, my friend. Here is the link of Google guidance: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en. Check all the Black-hat techniques Google mentioned on their guidance. If you are doing any of these, it is the time to stopping it and change to other SEO techniques.

5. Backlinks.

It supposes to be included in black-hat techniques, but I mean lots of people are so interested in this topic, so I just take it out and give it a more detailed explanation. I personally think, most of the time people getting penalties is because of backlinks. Backlinks are one of the most important factors for the ranking, at the same time it is one of the hardest work when doing SEO. When you get penalties, you should check all the backlinks that have been discovered by Google (you can get this information on the new version of Google console ). After you get a list of backlinks, you could run a batch analysis for those links. I guess Moz tool has a metric called “spam score”. So, if your site has thousands of backlinks, go and use this kind of tool, otherwise, just do this work manually.

A couple of things you need to pay attention when judging a backlink:

  1. The number of external links
  2. The number of outbound links
  3. The diversity of external links
  4. Thin content or not
  5. The context of the website

There are definitely other factors for Google judging the backlinks, but these 5 are enough to evaluate a backlink.

Fourth Step, get the shits done and submit a re-consideration request

Alright, after you figure out the reasons why your site’s rank got dropped, It is the moment to get the shits done and submit a re-consideration request.

Hoping you at least take some thing out from this article. If you have any questions or thoughts, please comment below to let me know. Looking forward to hearing your voice.

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