Why Did My Site's
Google Ranking Drop?

There are many reasons why a site will drop in the rankings, so I've compiled a list of the most common reasons here. Start here, but once you've taken care of any of the ranking issues I describe, be sure to check Google's Guidelines For Webmasters to be sure you're in compliance. Pay particular attention to the Quality Guidelines, because that section contains the rules that will incur a penalty if you violate them. The other search engines all have similar guidelines that you need to follow.

1. Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity: One or more links to your site that had been providing a significant amount of PageRank to your site have been removed/deleted, moved to a new, unranked page, or the PageRank of the originating site has dropped (for similar reasons). Sites with low to modest PageRank often obtain the bulk of their link strength from a small number of links. So the loss of even one of them can have a major impact on their rankings.


2. Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm: Search engines are constantly changing the methods they use to rank websites in order to improve the general quality of their search results and to weed out the sites that are resorting to various tricks (ie. so-called "black hat" optimization techniques) to artificially boost their rankings. For the past few years, Google has been making important changes to their algorithm on a fairly frequent basis. Yahoo! has been moving much more slowly, with only one or two major changes per year. MSN is too new to determine what their usual practice will be over time, and their new Bing search engine is just the latest wrinkle. The point is that search engines do change their methods and you can't rely on your rankings to remain unchanged forever.


3. Cinderella Story or "Honeymoon" Effect: If your site is less than 6 months old, you may have been getting an artificial boost in your rankings from Google to help your site be seen. But that extra ranking power for new sites doesn't last forever. You'll be flying high one day and not to be seen the next. Again, this usually comes down to low link popularity since it takes time and effort to build quality links to a new website. A continuous link building program is your best insurance against falling rankings. See my Building Links article for some good advice.


4. Malware or Hacking: If Google detects malware on your pages, it will warn users who click on your pages in the search results before sending them to your site. This is not really a drop in ranking, but the effect is just as bad since very few users will proceed past such a warning. Google has some Good advice for repairing a hacked site. You can use Google's Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool to check your site using the form below:




5. Penalty: The search engines are getting very aggressive about violations of their guidelines and are quick to punish some transgressions. Some of the most common causes of penalties include:
   
   
   • Multiple Domain Names: Having multiple domain names pointing to the same site is a common mistake that new webmasters make, thinking that it will lead to better rankings when just the opposite is true. While this practice doesn't trigger an actual penalty, the search engines' methods for filtering out duplicate content can damage your rankings. See "Duplicate Content" below.
   
   
   • Linking to a penalized, or so-called "bad neighborhood" site: This is another mistake that a novice might make without knowing that he may be doing something in violation of the search engines guidelines. Make sure that any site you link to is one that you would be happy to have your users visit and that has a majority of its pages included in Google's index. In general, a single link to a bad neighborhood won't hurt you unless you also have other quality issues, but you should always be careful in posting links on your site.
   
   
   • Hidden Text: Hidden text is an old trick that can remain undetected by the search engines for a long time, but is usually discovered at some point. Don't hide text by making it the same color as the page background. Google sniffs that out very easily these days and can get you a significant penalty. This doesn't mean you can't use CSS methods for drop-down menus or to keep content invisible until a user requests it (by mouseovers or clicks). As long as there is a legitimate reason for using CSS in this manner, you won't be penalized. Just don't try to stuff keywords on a page and make it so that only the search engines will see it. You'll get burned eventually.
   
   
   • Excessive Link Exchanges: Yes, I know that I recommend link exchanges for new websites and I also know that Google discourages the practice. But although their guidelines are ambiguous, their actions are easier to interpret. Limit your link exchanges to related, good quality sites. A couple of dozen is all you need to get your site on the right track, not hundreds or thousands. Don't do massive exchanges through automated programs that create link exchange directories on your site. They don't improve your rankings and are likely to reduce Google's level of trust for your site. Trust is a term you will run into more and more as you study Search Engine Optimization. Both Google and Yahoo! use that term.
   
   
   • Text Link Ads: While all of the major search engines prohibit selling links, Google has been the most aggressive in penalizing link sellers. If you're selling links or other advertising links that can pass PageRank, your site may have it's PageRank score reduced or it may have it's ability to pass on PageRank removed. In either case, that can mean your site's internal pages will no longer rank as well as they had before. If you're a link buyer, it can mean that you've wasted your money on links that are no longer helping your rankings. If you have paid links or advertising on your site, make sure that all of the links have the attribute rel="nofollow" in the <a>nchor tag in the HTML code.
   
   
   • Thin Afffiliate Site: Google prohibits sites that exist only to serve affiliate advertising. You can have affiliate ads if your site contains original high-quality content. It's only sites that essentially serve keyword-stuffed pages that consist mainly of ads and little good quality original content for the user that will be penalized.
   
   
   
   
6. Canonicalization Problems: My personal favorite because, without changing a thing on your site, you can fall victim to this problem in Google. All it takes is someone linking to your site with the wrong version of your URL and you can start to have some problems. This is mostly a problem for newer websites that haven't firmly established themselves in Google. Fortunately, you can recover easily from this one. See Website Canonicalization Repair article for details.


7. Broken links: If one of your internal pages is critical to your site's success - either for its ability to draw traffic by its high search engine ranking or because its a critical navigation page - making a typographical error in a link can mean a major section of your site is suddenly disconnected from the rest of your site and therefore vulnerable to being dropped by the search engines. Normally, a critical page will have several links, but novices will sometimes fall victim to this error. The cure is to make a habit of regularly using a link checker like the free utility Xenu Link Sleuth, or the W3C's Link Checker.


8. Server Problems: If Google has difficulty accessing your site, if it's slow to respond or responds with an error code for a sustained period, it can lead to problems. Search engines are very tolerant of short periods when a site may be unavailable for maintenance or other issues, but if the problems persist over many days it can impact your rankings. If you know your site will be down for maintenance, you should set your server to respond with code 503, which informs the search engines that you're aware of the situation and they should try again later.


9. robots.txt Issues: Your robots.txt file may be blocking the search engines from crawling some or all of your pages. Review your robots.txt file to make sure it looks good. There's a tool in Google's Webmaster Tools console that will let you test your robots.txt file to make sure it does what you want it to.


10. Duplicate Content: You should do everything you can to prevent the same content from being available through more than one URL on your website or anyone else's. When Google finds duplicate pages, it tries to select the "best" or "canonical" version and devalues all of the copies. But as a webmaster, you don't get to choose which copy they select as best. This problem crops up quite often when people have blogs or shopping carts on their sites. So if you have either a popular blog or a shopping cart script, be sure to look for the latest version of your blog software and any plug-ins that might be available to help. Another source of duplicate content is other sites copying your site. This is particularly annoying since you obviously had nothing to do with creating the problem. It's a good idea to use services like CopyScape to check for other sites copying your pages. They have both free and paid services available.

Google offers webmasters substantial help through their Webmaster Tools. You can get a detailed analysis of your site's status in Google there. But for websites that have been penalized, there is a form called the "Reconsideration Request" form that lets you tell Google that you have repaired any violations you found and ask that any penalties be removed. While Google's automatic systems will usually remove a penalty if a site has been brought into compliance, filing a Reconsideration Request can speed the process along be several weeks or months.