Why has my ranking dropped in Google?

For many web designers struggling to get their site ranked highly in Google, SEO can be a frustrating.

Once a web designer has applied all their SEO knowledge on their site, they can spend many hours tweeking their content and other SEO factors to improve their ranking within Google. Then all of a sudden and after spending all this time the websites rank will suddenly drop.

If you go onto any web design forum and ask why, you may get a number of different answers as there is no clear and definitive reason. Although I may not be any more help, I can go through all the different explanations you might get.

 

The Google Dance

The Google dance is the first explanation you may hear. This is where your websites listing in Google will disappear. The term Google dance is Google’s system for updating its cache and evaluating how important your website is by the amount and quality of back links pointing at your domain. This process is thought to take several days and happens about ten times in a year.

On the flip side of the coin there are SEO experts who will tell you that the Google dance is dead or at least changed. The reason being is that dynamic websites or sites where the content is constantly changing will get crawled almost every day. This means that the dynamics of Google has changed and the process of listing websites is much faster.

Spam links

Spam links are another common factor in websites ranking dropping in Google. Google detects sites that have been abused, with too many links and not enough content and punishes them by removing them from the search engine. Google will then also punish any site that has linked to this site as it will see it as a potential spam site too. When exchanging links it is advisable to explore their site and ensure that there are not too many outgoing links and that they have rich valuable content.

Changing your content instead of adding more

                                             
Changing your content instead of adding more is argued to have a negative effect on your SEO. However this does depend on how your content has been changed. For example by replacing your text with content that is unrelated and without your keywords will have a massive effect on your SEO, most likely resulting in a change of your searchable terms in Google. Whereas changing the content with similar topics and with improved grammar will not actually have much of an immediate effect. In any case you should take the time to make sure your content is to the highest standards before uploading it to your web page.

Changing your title and Meta tags

By changing the tile and Meta tags on your web page will undoubtedly affect your Google ranking. There are two ways this can make an impact. The first is to remove the keywords or to use the same keyword too many times, either way this could destroy your Google search. The second is to use too many keywords on the title or Meta tag. This is more likely to just lower your Google ranking rather than remove it altogether. Some SEO experts will argue that you should use all 70 character spaces for your title increasing your chances of being found under a variety of searches. Others argue that by using too many will dilute your main keywords and that your title and Meta description should be fairly short. Whatever you decide, your title and Meta description should be unique from each other, which is a common mistake by many web designers.

Bounce rate increasing

Bounce rate is when a visitor clicks onto a page of your site from a search engine and click off straight away without visiting any other page on your website. However there are single page websites that still do well suggesting that an increasing bounce rate does not have an effect on a websites ranking in Google. A more likely factor is how long a visitor remains on your site.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is the most likely reason for a site to have a sudden drop in Google. Google is known for rewarding sites that have quality content, and as such will punish those who try and cheat with use of repeated copy. If your site needs to have duplicate content on for whatever reason, it is advisable to have robots.txt to block Google from reading any pages that have the same content on.

 

 

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