Do you own a business website or blog and want to know why your keyword rankings on Google have dropped lately? There could be a few reasons.
1) You got a manual penalty – This is probably the worst thing that can happen to your website since your rankings will drop a lot and it will be tough to recover from. Your best bet is to not engage in blackhat SEO practices in order to avoid penalties, but if you want to resolve the penalty then you should get rid of any unnatural links you have pointing to your site. A Google employee will let you know the reason why you were penalized so you know what to do.
2) You got an algorithm penalty – Google’s search algorithm is constantly being updated and looks out for websites that it thinks are breaking the rules by doing things like getting an excess of spammy links with the same keyword text pointing back to your website. If you overuse the same keyword when building links it may appear unnatural to Google and you may receive a rankings drop because of it. Its best to make the majority of your anchor text either branded or general (click here, visit website). If you got an algorithm penalty then you’ll need to analyze your backlink profile and either change the anchor text of some of the backlinks or get rid of the links if they are spammy.
3) Your website is having an issue – A common reason why keyword rankings are dropping are because of issues going on with your website such as a server error, 404 errors, redirect loops, or very slow loading time. Anything that is preventing visitors from coming or staying on your website will result in your rankings quickly dropping. Make sure to watch over your keyword rankings using a Serp API of some sort.
These are the 3 most common reasons you may see a ranking drop. Now you know how to avoid them.
