Lost your Google Search Rankings? Tactics to Recovery using the “Rank Drop Quadrant”

“Sean, I can’t find my site ranking anymore in the Top 10 in Google for ‘florida luxury homes’. What happened to my search rankings suddenly? Why have my Google rankings fallen so dramatically!”

“Why has traffic to my site suddenly dropped? I can’t find my site anywhere on Google?! What’s happening?”

Ask anyone who’s worked in the field of SEO for more than a couple of years and it’s more likely than not that he/she would’ve got an email like this from a client. You could find yourself in the same boat at any time and you want to be best prepared for it!

The world of SEO is complex and always subject to change. Nowadays, it’s become a fine art and requires a balance of both technical and creative strategies.

Implementing Topical Mapping to Regain Lost Google Search Rankings

Implementing topical mapping in your SEO strategy is an excellent way to regain lost Google search rankings. Topical maps represent the interconnectedness and relevance of various topics, subtopics, and keywords within your website content. They help visualize the structure of your content and ensure it aligns with search engine expectations.

When applying the principles of the “Rank Drop Quadrant” to your SEO recovery efforts, topical mapping can offer significant assistance. A well-structured website with clear topical mapping helps search engine crawlers to better understand your site, which can enhance your search ranking.

If the quadrant analysis points to keyword issues, topical maps can also help identify which keywords are most relevant to your website’s main topic and subtopics. By examining how these keywords are linked and how relevant they are to your overall content, you can adjust your keyword usage to improve your website’s SEO.

In cases where content quality has been identified as the culprit behind your rankings drop, a topical authority map can highlight content gaps or redundancies. This gives you the opportunity to improve the quality of your content by adding more depth to your existing topics or by exploring new, relevant subtopics. Ultimately, the visualization and insights provided by topical mapping can guide your efforts to regain your lost Google search rankings.

Google updates its search algorithm multiple times in a year with possible incremental changes happening every day. As an example, way back in February 2012, they made 40 updates to their algorithm within a single month.

Here’s an infographic on the 9 Major Google Algorithm Updates Every SEO Webmaster Must Know.

So, you see, there’s a lot of scope for change, and as such, it stands to reason that there are always random fluctuations in the SERPs. It happens all the time: one day your rankings are sky-high, and a few days later, you drop a dozen or so positions and your revenue starts to plummet.

There are a couple of things you’d want to do if you were to find yourself in such a situation. Identify what could’ve gone wrong and effectively communicate with your SEO client/boss how you’re going to handle the situation.

Before you get back to your client, you’d ideally want to analyze what went wrong and give them a reason for the drop in Google rankings. Of course, this assumes that you already have some kind of rank tracking set up for their sites. If you don’t, there’s no way you can keep on top of things and you should start tracking and checking your rankings right away.

There could be a few reasons as to why your Google rankings have fallen. We need to first evaluate how bad is the situation before figuring out what to do next. Here, at Mondovo, we’ve developed something we call a Rank Drop Quadrant. This quadrant categorizes the situation based on – a) how many keywords you’ve lost rankings for, and b) what is the average position drop in rankings. The quadrant is illustrated below:

~THE RANK DROP QUADRANT~

The Rank Drop Quadrant is useful if you’re tracking at least 100 keywords for a site and there has been an overall negative trend in rankings for the site. To break down your ranking analysis, first identify the right quadrant:

Chill Zone – When you have just a few keywords that have fallen and the position drop is minor. The Chill zone typically requires no panic as this could be a normal day to day ranking fluctuation happening on a global scale.

Alert Zone – When you have many keywords that have fallen in rankings but the position drop is minimal. This situation is a bit more serious because it’s not only a few keywords that have fallen. You want to be “alert” and in the investigative mode before the situation slips into any of the other two zones.

Worry Zone – When you have a few primary keywords that have fallen out of the index or dropped majorly. This is a worry zone because you are losing key traffic from potentially qualified visitors. An immediate analysis is required out here to quickly address the situation.

Disaster Zone – When you have a large number of keywords that have fallen and all have either completely fallen out of the index or dropped by 10+ positions on average. There’s something that’s gone seriously wrong out here. Immediate investigative analysis and recovery action will need to be taken.

Now that you’ve identified which of the above 4 quadrants you’ve fallen into, let’s deep dive further into analyzing what could be a relevant reason for the ranking drop.

Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. – Damon Richards

Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Tweet This

Case A > CHILL ZONE: Few keywords have lost rankings and the drop in average position has been small

Possible reasons:

a. It’s the Google Swing

Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, and more so now than ever before. Google has been known to experiment with ranking positions dynamically, which is why you might even find sites ranking up and down within the same day. It is also commonly called the Google Dance.

>> How can you fix this?
You can’t and as long as the ranking drop is minor, it could just be a random fluctuation and at times, you could see yourself back on top. As long as the dip is not something that has resulted in a consistent long-term dip in organic traffic, you shouldn’t worry too much about this. Carry on with SEO activities as usual and you should be back.

b. A new competitor has displaced you

There might be a situation where your Google search rankings would have fallen by a position or two and you see someone else who has taken your position.

>> How can you fix this?

Check for on-page changes the competing site has made recently. You could do so by checking the archive of their page in Archive.org and comparing it with their current live version. You could also run an on-page analysis comparison between the two versions to determine the differences. Apart from that, check for recent backlinks that the site may have acquired from other sources. These links/mentions could have helped. You could use Mondovo’s backlink analysis tool to identify them.

Case B > ALERT ZONE: Many keywords have suffered a drop in rankings BUT the average ranking position hasn’t fallen too badly

Possible reasons:

a. Have you lost a few links recently?

If you have lost Google rankings for many of keywords, there are chances that your site has lost some authority. Do check if you happened to lose some key quality backlinks to your site.

b. A new competitor has displaced you

The reasons and strategies would be similar to those outlined for the same point under the Chill Zone section.

c. Did you make some structural changes to the site recently?

This happens more often than people think and is usually the last reason people will think for their dip in rankings. But in most cases, it can be the most strong possibility. You will want to run an audit of your entire site to correct any obvious issues, re-evaluate any content changes you may have made recently, ensure that you are optimizing your internal links and lastly, check that you’ve not messed up with the canonical tag.

d. Has your content become stale

If you learn that a lot of these keywords were for content pages that are article/information oriented and those resources have lost traction in recent times, there’s a chance that Google might favor some of the more recently written articles on the topic. It can be a sound tactic to keep updating old well-ranked articles from time to time and sometimes, maybe even consider hiding the date from your posts. Google does show the date in some search rankings snippets and imagine you have an article showing 2009 and others show 2015, a prospective searcher is more likely to click the 2015 article and also Google may note the dipping CTRs and push down your website rankings.

e. Website Speed

Google has prioritized user experience over other factors and so, they decided to take site speed into account for determining ranking positions. Here is a detailed view of how load times can affect Google Rankings.

Case C > WORRY ZONE: A few of your primary keywords have dropped dramatically in their Google rankings

Possible reasons:

a. Lost links to the specific pages where Search Rankings have fallen

If you’ve lost rankings to specific pages of your site, then the first thing you’d want to check is if you lost any backlinks you had acquired to those pages. A loss in quality backlinks can mean a loss of a quality ranking signal, which can result in declined rankings.

b. Google Algorithmic update favoring other kinds of sites for this query

Google constantly tweaks its algorithm and may determine that for those kinds of specific terms, more “informational” pages are required, more “fresh” pages are required, more “diverse” results in the form of images/videos/news are required or more “transactional” pages are required. So your pages might have fallen out of favor for any of these reasons. You can identify this by observing the change in positions of the other top ranking sites for the terms. If this is the case, you might want to re-evaluate your targeting strategy for these pages based on what is ranking or choose another set of search rankings term to target.

c. Duplicate/Similar content elsewhere on the site

Duplication of content across the site can be a reason for the drop in rankings, so you might want to check this out.

d. Broken links on the pages

Do a check of the internal links on the pages where you’ve lost rankings, are there any broken links that have slipped in by chance. Having dead links can be a negative signal to rank your site in Google search engine because of the resulting poor user experience, so you might want to check and correct this. Mondovo’s site audit tool can help you discover all the broken links on your website.

e. Stale content

This would be for the same reason as mentioned above under the Alert Zone.

Case D > DISASTER ZONE: A lot of keywords have lost their Google rankings and the fall has been steep for most keywords

Possible reasons:

a. Check for a Google Penalty

There are two types of penalties Google applies. First is the by-product of an existing algorithm update, and second is a manual penalty issued by the Google Search Quality Team for violating their guidelines.

If it is a manual penalty, Google will notify you in your Webmaster Search Console. If you haven’t got any manual warning, you might want to check for the following:

1. Check your Web Analytics for a big sudden ranking drop.

If there has been a huge sudden drop in organic traffic then it’s likely you’ve suffered from some kind of algorithmic penalty update.

2. Check if your site is indexed.

In the Google search bar, type in ‘site:yourdomain.com’. If you see few or no pages, you may be looking at a penalty problem or indexing issue.

3. Check if there has been a recent algorithm update.

If any major update has taken place recently and if it correlates with your drop date, it is another sign of a penalty.

b. Check your robots.txt and your meta robots tags

Have you mistakenly prevented your site or its key pages from being indexed via a wrongly formatted robots.txt or an unintentional meta robots ‘noindex’ tag? It’s rare that this should be the cause but you never know, and this is the easiest issue to fix [so you might want to pray this is the cause ;)]. Sometimes the simplest of mistakes can cause the biggest damage.

c. Did you change your content layout to include a lot more ads?

The Google Panda algorithm update devalued sites that hampered user reading experiences. If you changed your content structure to show more ads and the ads are positioned in a way that can affect user experience, they could have a negative impact on your SERP Positions. You want to ensure you don’t compromise on user experience for extra monetization opportunities.

d. Were you relying on a network of links?

Did you knowingly build a network of artificial links either through a network of private-owned blogs, directories, etc? Or was there any mass link generation tactic you used? There’s a high chance that Google/Bing sniffed out and detected the links as “fake” and devalued those sites. You might want to revisit how you build links keeping in mind some other link building strategies.

So that concludes the Quadrant and the various possibilities that lie under each Quadrant. We will be updating this post from time to time with newer possible reasons, as and when Google updates their algorithm. So do keep checking back. If you have a client who tells you, “why have my Google rankings suddenly dropped“, this is the article you want to refer.

Now hopefully you’ll be able to identify if your client’s site falls under any of the above quadrants and accordingly, come up with a relevant plan of action. After doing that, your next job is to communicate this piece of bad news in a way that they still have faith in you and your services.

This is the first post in a two-part blog series. Read on about how to deliver such bad news to your SEO clients and yet keep them happy.

As a final reminder, it’s always good to be two steps ahead and to get all your tracking in place before such an event arises. It’s highly recommended you make the most out of your rank tracker and track search rankings on a regular basis as well as keep tabs on data from your Google Search Console, both of which can be done from within Mondovo at a few dollars a month.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Sameer Panjwani

Sameer Panjwani is the CEO & Founder of Mondovo.com.

Latest posts by Sameer Panjwani (see all)

• Website Security: 5 Strategies Brands Can Follow to Keep Their Website Safe - July 24, 2023
• Why Topical Authority Matters, all you need to know about the “Topical Depth” SEO Ranking Factor - July 20, 2022
• Just discovered how my top competitor is getting links via “Author Spying”! - July 18, 2022