Why my rankings dropped?

A:
We know ourselves how frightening and annoying it could be noticing a sudden drop of our web pages. We do not advise our clients do anything when such an unpleasant situation happens. In the first phase there is no need for panic, at least for a couple of days or weeks. We have decided to list the top reasons why a page can drop in the search engine result listings:

Use of unethical black hat tactics

It can be use of hidden text, stuffed keywords in keyword Meta tag and content or cloaking, which will result in a definite penalty from the search engines removing the website from their index. After a website gets banned or penalized by search engines, a re-indexing request can be sent to Google with the condition to remove all of the black hat SEO techniques used. Usually this procedure of getting re-indexed might take several weeks or even months or never.

Algorithm update

This is one of the top reasons why a website is dropped suddenly as ranking factors varies with each algo update, first of all for the benefits of searchers and the search engines in parallel. Search engines' main goal is to deliver the most relevant websites in their SERPs spreading their reputation while assuring a successful business for themselves. Nobody knows exactly when the next algorithm update will occur as they are basically unpredictable and no one knows for sure when the next update should be expected. Learn more about some of the most renowned algo updates in the last four years:
Florida- Algo Update
Brandy- Algo Update
Jagger- Algo Update
Reduce Googlebomb Impact- Algo Update

Use of poison words

Poison words also known as stop words, are decreasing the ranking of a website, that's why at each contextual update you have to be careful what words you are using in the title or description tag as well as in the actual content of your web pages. There are many kind of poison words and one of the most common used are adult related obscene words or terms which are not appropriate to be used in the content of a non adult website. Other poison words worth mentioning are those so called ranking decreasers like 'Link' , 'Bookmark' , 'Resources', 'Directory' etc. There are also rumors spreading that the words 'free' and 'offer' might have a negative impact on web pages containing one of these words.

Broken Links

It is advisable to check your website with a broken link checker tool like Xenu's Link Sleuth. Spiders are downgrading a website value if they find many broken links; links which are either not pointing to the exact target as they might have probably been mistyped or the page does not exist any more. In order to avoid such occurrences on your website, it is advisable to use the broken link checker tool regularly or whenever a major update of your website has been made.

Linking to bad neighborhoods

Before placing a link leading to another website, always check the quality of that website and most important check if it hasn't been banned from Google. You can easily ruin your ranking by adding one single outgoing link on your website leading to a banned website which can be a FFA link farm or a website with little or inadequate content on it.

Fluctuation

SERPs are in a constant move and your rankings might drop and get back in a few days however you should be patient till your web pages get their rankings back.

Update of your website

From time to time anyone feels the content of his website should be updated or completely changed from A - Z. In case the website had very good rankings, any contextual change made, should be carefully examined before uploading especially if the percentage of the content exceeds ten percent. The theme of the content should be the same as well as the keyword density and uniqueness of the content without any duplicates found on other web pages. All this is needed since as long as search engines notice a major change in the content, they would re-index the page in order to analyze it before deciding on the ranking position if the page kept its relevancy and the other factors that search engine algorithms are considering before ranking. You should also be careful adding many (hundreds) pages in a very short period of time as it might be considered automatically generated content which is usually regarded as black hat technique and most probably will be penalized by search engines.

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