If your web pages are not performing well on the search engine results page or SERP, then online visibility can hit hard within a few days or weeks. This means less organic traffic will visit the website and resulting in impacting your business. At this stage we must act quickly in order to improve SEO strategy and once you notice the signs of a drop in overall SEO ranking.
Reasons For Drop-In Website Ranking and How To Get Back:
Pages Having NoIndex Tags
When you keep the track of keyword rankings and learn that some of the most important pages are not even visible in single search results, then it is due to the noindex tag in the pages section. Without indexing and crawling, the page will not have any SERP ranking. Sometimes the noindex tag can be added during development and was left there by mistake when the pages go live.
Verify the noindex error by looking for the Coverage report on Google Search Console. If the website is new and it is without sufficient Search Console data, try using various tools available.
Googlebot is unable to Crawl Pages
Robots.txt is a text file having instructions for web crawlers, including Googlebot. It blocks or allows access to the pages. It contains a rule for blocking Googlebot from crawling through specific pages, if so, then the search won’t be able to discover pages and it may affect the SERP ranking as well as its visibility.
Make sure that search engine bots are allowed to access critical pages. This will help avoid major technical SEO mistakes as they understand the scope and limitations of the robots.txt file.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can appear on a website or across the website. When two URLs have the same content or are redirecting to the same page, Google chooses only one version and shows it to users, this is known as the master copy or source URL. If you don’t add a canonical tag to the page URL, Google will display only the canonical version of your content and the one you want to rank in Google ranking will not be there.
Always remove duplicate content. In case there are multiple URLs, add the rel=canonical attribute to the section of the master copy, and you can duplicate the pages.
Penalized By Google
In rare cases, if there is a sudden drop in SERPs rank is caused by a manual Google penalty. If you did something drastic or tried manipulating SEO rankings by spamming or hiding text/stuffing keywords then Google will alert you.
Check the penalty and try applying the fix to all pages affected. Google ranking may not return to previous levels, but after recovery due to minus quality issues, the SERPs rank algorithm will evaluate the pages once again.
Website Not Updated For Better Page Experience
The Page Experience comprises the latest array of ranking signals, which include the Core Web Vitals, which focus on page load speed, visual stability, and interactivity. It takes weeks or more to set the Page Experience optimization in motion.
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