Toronto Computer Service

Has your site’s search engine ranking dropped dramatically?

Are you wondering what in the world could have caused the plunge?

Read on to find out 10 things that could be responsible:

1. The end of Google Honeymoon: If your relatively new site had enjoyed high rankings for some time but has lost it all, it has been on a Google Honeymoon which, unfortunately, has ended. And you’re not alone; that’s a phenomenon all new sites go through.
2. You are now in the Google Sandbox: What happens to the newer sites post the “Google Honeymoon” (or any other phenomenon, for that matter)? They get dropped in the Google Sandbox (meaning a drop in rankings), a phenomenon we call the “Google Sandbox Effect”. And the reason? The sites are new and unproven. To get your site out of the sandbox, you’ve got to prove your site’s value and that can be done by using low competition keywords, creating mind blowing content, and looking for high authority incoming links.
3. Algorithm updates: Drop in search engine rankings overnight? It is most probably because of the algorithm updates that search engines are so busy doing to keep things fresh and make sure that the best content is kept at the top. However, even if your site is all fresh and filled with great content, it’s rankings can still drop with the updates, courtesy of the sites you get a lot of your links from which have been affected by the update.
4. Malware: Why aren’t your visitors visiting your site anymore? Malware could be the one to blame here. If Google finds malware on any of your pages, it is quick to notify any potential visitors in the SERPs who click on your page before they actually get to your site. Webmasters linking to your site could also be deterred to link. That definitely explains why your traffic has plunged and so has your rankings.
5. Server issues: Maybe the rankings have dropped because Google cannot access your server because of issues with your host or on your end and you have left the issue unsolved for some days.
6. Robot.txt file problems: Are you sure you have not made any mistakes in your robot.txt? It may be prohibiting search engine crawlers from gaining access to certain pages of your site. So make sure you’re only blocking the URLs you don’t want crawled with that file.
7. Penalization: Whether you’ve used Black Hat SEO or don’t even know what you have done, you could have been penalized by Google.
8. Broken Links (especially a prominent internal link on your site): This could be another reason for the drop. You can quick fix it with a free WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker which notifies you of broken links as soon as it detects one on its regular checks.
9. Duplicate content: It doesn’t matter if your content is original, if someone else has copied your content, Google decides which is duplicate and it could deem yours to be the copied one. You see, search engines hate duplicate content with a passion. Or you could have issues of similar content on different pages of the same site. Why don’t you bust the copycats with CopyScape? It’s free!
10. The Google Dance: Your drop in rankings might just be the result of random shuffling and fluctuation of listings which usually doesn’t last long, a phenomenon we call “The Google Dance”. Now, we can’t explain why Google does the dance but we can definitely tell you that if it’s the reason, you could be getting your rankings back pretty soon.