One of the most common complaints among website owners is: “My website used to rank in a great position on Google, and now it has dropped in rankings or won’t move up.” If your site has also started losing rankings in the past month or two, there may be several reasons that even someone who is not an SEO expert can check. In this article, we will review the main reasons that can lead to ranking drops on Google.
Reasons for Losing Rankings on Google
1. Google Updates
Google updates occur constantly and usually cannot be avoided. A moderate drop in rankings is completely normal, but a drastic drop typically indicates the conscious use of problematic techniques. These updates are hard to control, but you can take comfort in the fact that the next update might “fix” your site retroactively. There are platforms that track Google updates against your website traffic using data received from Analytics, so you can know exactly which update impacted you. One such platform is Zefo, where you can find explanations in Hebrew.
2. A Website That Doesn't Move Forward Falls Behind
SEO is dynamic. Therefore, if you stopped using the services of an SEO agency, hired an unprofessional SEO company, or reduced your marketing budget, it is very possible that your competitors kept working and surpassed you in the rankings. A very simple way to check this is to take the keywords for which you lost rankings and see which websites appear in top positions. Do you notice a prominent presence of those sites? If so, they may have worked very hard over recent months.
If you still trust your SEO company, they should more or less know what happened here by conducting a competitor analysis. If their answers still sound evasive, do not hesitate to push and demand answers—that is why you are paying them!
3. Does the Site Contain Malicious Software?
Websites containing malware can sometimes lose rankings on Google, although it is more likely that the block will occur at the browser level. In other words, the site itself will not necessarily lose its rankings, but users will be prevented from accessing it.
In this case, you might see a decrease in traffic. There are two ways to know if this is truly the issue:
1. Look for suspicious activity in the Search Console Security Issues report (requires site verification).
2. Installing a WordPress security plugin such as Wordfence. Even in its free version, it can provide a fairly good diagnosis of your site’s status and prevent future attacks.
4. Did You Lose Important Links?
If you worked with an SEO agency that built links pointing to your site (“link building”) or performed link exchanges without an agency’s assistance, they may have been removed unilaterally. If you have documentation of the exchanges or links that the agency built for you, the first important step is to compile all of them in one place.
The next step is to try and understand why they were removed by sending emails or even making a phone call: sometimes these were links included as part of a package deal, sometimes it was a deliberate action by someone who hoped you wouldn’t notice they removed your link, and sometimes these are pages or even entire websites that were deleted. In all these cases, you should try to salvage what you can.
In the third step, you should look for additional links that you might not have documented at all.
Most backlink checking services such as Majestic offer this feature. It will not only show you all the links in its index, but also how many links you lost over time. It is advisable to purchase a paid plan for at least one month. It will cost you a few dozen dollars, but it is an essential step if you want to get the full picture.
5. You Were Harmed by Low-Quality Links
Just as you can be hurt by “good” links that were removed, you can also be hurt by “bad links” built using “black hat” techniques. These are low-quality links that initially have a positive impact on the site, but later cause the exact opposite effect and “crash” the site.
This could be the result of work done by a problematic SEO agency you worked with in the past, although some also claim that competitors can intentionally harm you. In any case, you should check if you received a message in Search Console under Manual Actions. This means that it is not an algorithmic penalty (or not only one), but a manual action by Google’s quality team. In other words, it is not enough to fix the issue and remove what is needed; you also need to submit a “reconsideration” request to Google to restore the site to its previous positions. You send this request after cleaning the site of all the problematic links you can.
Since links are a sensitive issue, it is highly recommended not to perform these actions yourself: you might accidentally harm good links and cause your site to drop even further. By the way, another and less common scenario occurs when someone uses your site to inject low-quality outbound links to other websites. This someone could be a hacker or an SEO agency that operates using those same black hat methods mentioned earlier. In this case as well, you might receive an alert that looks something like this (in Hebrew or English):
6. You Were Hit by an Algorithm Related to Low-Quality Content
Google rolls out ongoing updates all the time, and one of the changes Google seems to make regularly relates to content. The largest content update (“Panda”) is already more than a decade old, but that does not mean minor updates cannot affect you.
Sometimes, even if your site had plenty of high-quality content, adding low-quality content at a later stage can hurt all of the site’s rankings.
Here are examples of several types of such pages:
- Pages with very thin content (including pages that only contain images or videos)
- Pages copied from other sites or even duplicated within your own site
- Pages with a reasonable length of content, but high keyword density—meaning excessive repetition of the keywords you want to rank for, out of proportion to the rest of the text.
Sometimes, though not always, you can find evidence that Google penalized you in Search Console under “Manual Actions,” just as we explained regarding links. This is what it might look like:
Note that you can see whether the impact affects only some pages or the entire website.
7. Your Website's Technical Performance Is Not as Good as It Used to Be
If you made a fundamental change to the site, such as replacing a large number of pages, migrating to another hosting provider, or finally switching to a mobile-friendly version, this might be the reason for the drop in rankings. In recent years, Google has started paying close attention to these aspects, and in extreme cases, it can downgrade the ranking of sites whose technical performance is subpar:
Here are a few things that are important to check:
1. What is the site speed according to Google (via PageSpeed Insights). This tool will also provide you with suggestions for improvement that you can forward to your developer or web development agency.
2. Does the desktop version contain content that does not appear in the mobile version? (Today, unlike in the past, Google looks at mobile first and ranks search results across all devices accordingly)
3. Is the mobile interface user-friendly? For example, buttons are sufficiently spaced, lines do not break mid-sentence, there are no layout distortions on small screens, etc. You can also view this report in Search Console. Here is an explanation of each of the notices that may appear.
8. Security
Unsecured websites may suffer a drop in rankings in certain cases, though this is usually not the primary cause. Nevertheless, security has other advantages, such as secure form submission and building greater trust with users. If your website still starts with http instead of https and there is no padlock icon next to its URL in the browser, you should install an SSL certificate. This is a fairly simple action that any developer or webmaster should know how to perform.
Summary
Auditing your site yourself after a drop in rankings is relatively straightforward and can help you decide how to proceed from here. However, when it comes to advanced topics like link building, we recommend not taking action alone. If you make changes to content, always back up existing content by creating a snapshot of the site as it appeared before the changes (WordPress, for instance, has dozens of backup plugins).
About the Author:
Yossi Cohen, Founder and Owner of Extra Digital.
Extra Digital is one of the leading and most established digital agencies in Israel. Founded in 2006, it has since been providing online marketing, SEO, and advanced digital solutions with high professionalism and thoroughness.
