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| Google Keyword Rank Drop |
Last month, I had all the clients annoyed with me for their website's keywords showing a dip in their positions. How on earth can I explain them the protocols used by Google Guru!!
They even ask me wether these SEO or SMO activities really help, as whenever Google spins its magic wand, the rankings go down and we are left no where. I know it is difficult to explain them the algorithms used by Google and explain them the reasons for they website's low performance but then, they actually do not mind blaming me…for making such lame excuses.
So, today I thought to pen down the basic and common reasons that make the rankings of the website fluctuate. In order for us to retain their rankings, we should actually review the website in totality, every 15-days and make the necessary changes.
Identify & Analyze the Root Cause - Sometimes, you might have noticed that from a rank #1 for your particular keyword, you might have shifted to #30 or below. The basic reason to check here is whether your competitor is getting ahead of you or has the algorithmic update affected your rankings. For both these reasons, you need to check the quality back links coming to your website; what extra activities have been performed by the competitor in previous months, check your Webmaster's account and read any warning from Google.
HoneyMoon Effect - Sometimes Google boosts the website's ranking for a website that is 6 months old, in order to increase its popularity in search engines. But this ranking does not last forever and you get frustrated to find the keyword someday deteriorating from #1 to NA in the search results. This again accounts top low link popularity as it takes time for a new website to gain quality links to the website.
Content, Content & Only High-Quality Content - Google wants the users to find the best possible solution for their queries in one go. If you want to be at top positions, then you need to have the best content on the website, which looks interesting a educative to the user, along with interlinking within the website such that they can find further information about the product from the website. Make sure that the content is not at all copied and looks totally natural. Google does not only crawl the best pages, but also analyzes the quality of the page, along with how many users visited that page, calculates the bounce rate etc.
High Quality Backlinks - Get a good amount of back links to the website, no doubt directory submissions is somewhat lost these days but you need to have quality links in order to get a good ranking for your website.
Use Disavow links from Webmaster - In case you have recognized few low quality links in your website, you should then use disavow tool that makes sure that Google does not crawl those pages and cleans them up so that all the unnatural links pointing to your website get demolished.
Robots.txt Issue - Yu might be feeling as to why have I mentioned robots.txt issue here. Sometimes, you might be disallowing Google spiders from crawling every page of the website. So, recheck the robots.txt file such that it only blocks your private folders.
Broken Links - Sometimes, a high value page that comes up in rankings, when been clicked, states broken link. This is a huge loss to the website as the users who would be coming to the website, will simply move off on finding nothing. The best idea would be to check the website using Xenu or W3c Link Checker tool.
Canonical Issue - Most of the users feel that canonical is a very small issue but this can actually lower your rankings. This is a common problem with new websites which are viewable in versions for e.g. one like - xyz.com and other - www.xyz.com; so Google will treat both the sites as unique and index the website as 2 different websites.
If you take care of all these issues and rectify the already coming errors, you are sure to improve on the rankings. Further, Google has its share of Panda & Penguin update, and no one knows what parameters they actually set in to mark a website's presence online
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| Google Panda Update |
