The rankings of your website on Google have dropped and you don’t know why this happened. Most webmasters face this problem at some time. Indeed, I experienced it myself with Cashback Shopper only last month! There are many reasons why rankings can rise or fall but here are the 4 main ones why they might drop:

Reason 1: Your website has been penalised or banned from Google

Search for “site:yoursite.com” on Google (replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name). If Google returns one or more pages from your website then your website has not been fully banned. Your site has NOT been banned completely, but HAS dropped for keyword searches for some reason.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Find out what you have done wrong on your website! Google doesn’t like spamming, cloaking, link building and similar shady tactics known as black hat SEO. Clean up your website, ensure that you are not using any of these methods and ask for reconsideration.

Reason 2: Your server rejects Google’s spider

Have you installed a new robots.txt file lately? Does your robots.txt file allow Google to index your website? Have you changed your htaccess file? Have you recently installed a spam bot blocker?

Are you 100% sure that the spam bot blocker lets Google through to your website? Google uses different IP addresses for its different spiders and some spam blockers might accidentally block one of the spiders. This might also look like cloaking to Google.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Double check the settings in your robots.txt file, your htaccess file and your spam bot blockers. If possible, avoid bot blockers because they might send the wrong bots away. I had an incorrectly configured robots file on one of my sites without realising it & only picked it up by using Google’s Webmaster Tools which reports errors found by the Google spiderbot.

Reason 3: Google has changed its algorithm

Google is continually tweaking its algorithm. It might be that one of the latest changes affected your website. Last year, Google released more than 450 changes of the ranking algorithm. That’s more than 37 per month. Google’s rankings have been very fluid of late, which indicates that the algorithm is changing more often than ever before.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Check your website to ensure that it is compliant to Google’s latest algorithm.

Reason 4: Your competitors increased their SEO efforts

You’re not the only one who wants to get high rankings for your keywords. Search engine optimisation is a constant competition & rankings are affected by a number of different factors both on & off page! Your competitors might have done something, even just one thing, better than you.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Analyse your competitors to find out what they’ve done to get the top rankings. Get better inbound links than your competitors and optimise your web pages.

Things that brought your website to the top of Google’s search results yesterday might not work today. If you want to get on Google’s first result page and stay there, you have to continually check if your website complies with Google’s latest changes & updates.