10 reasons your search rank may drop

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10 reasons your search rank may drop

People generally trust web pages found on the top positions in their search engine results. It takes a lot of time to build your online reputation and get high ranks in search engines. There are cases when your site may disappear from the list or get lower rank than before.

But what are the reasons for your ranking to drop? In this article we'll list 10 most common reasons for search results to disappear all of a sudden.

The Google Honeymoon Effect

If your site is relatively new and is only a few months old, you may find that your rank was quite high until recently. This is most likely the result of the Google Honeymoon. This term refers to the phenomenon where a new site has high ranking for a short period of time. Then it falls to its more realistic ranking.

Google Sandbox Effect

Quite often new sites get dropped in the sandbox shortly after being created because of the "Google Sandbox Effect". This is like a punishment for new sites just for being new and unproven. You might have had high ranks due to Google Honeymoon effect or for some other reason, but then it has dropped. To get high ranks again, you'll need to use low competition keywords, create unique and great content, and look for a proper number of incoming links to prove your value to Google and get the site out of the sandbox as soon as possible.

Algorithm changes

The most common reason for your site to change the usual position in search results is a change in the search engine's algorithms. Search engines algorithms are being constantly updated to make sure only the best content is located on the top of the list. Even if your site isn't directly affected by the algorithm update, sites which you get your links from could have been, so your ranking may likely drop because of that.

Malware

If your site has got infected with malware and Google detects it on any of your pages, the site visitors will be notified of that before entering your site. This may cause a great drop in traffic as very few people will proceed after they see such warning. This can cause not only your traffic loss, but ranking drop, too.

Server Issues

If your server is unaccessible for Google because of issues with your host or for some other reason, this can cause a problem. Make sure your site is up as soon as possible.

Robot.txt File issues

Make sure your robot.txt file doesn't prohibit search engine crawlers to gain access to certain pages of your site. You can find your ranking drop all of a sudden, so make sure this file is only blocking the URLs you don't want to be crawled.

Penalization

Breaking Google's rules may get your site penalized without your even realizing it. Make sure you do not use any black hat SEO techniques to prevent possible penalization.

Broken Links

Broken links within your site can cause serious problems. Check all your links manually is a time-consuming process. There is a number of online tools that allow you to check your site for broken links.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content isn't good for search engines. This can happen within one and the same site, but it can be an issue with different websites, as well. When Google finds duplicate content in two or more locations online, it has to determine which site content is original, and your site may not always be trusted, though you might have put that content on your site first.

Use online tools (e.g. http://www.copyscape.com/) from time to time, to see if anyone has copied your content without permission.

The Google Dance

The Google Dance refers to the phenomenon of pages randomly changing their position in search results. As you may know, Google uses different data centers for making search results list. So, two people looking for the same thing may get the results from different data centers. The good news here is that your site will shortly rank high again. This is just a temporary thing.

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[Delois]

From all above points, algorithm changes and duplicate content can affect most of your keyword ranking. Due to changes in algorithm all the websites get affected and with identification duplicate content, your site authority gets decreased.

[rahulkhanna]

Very well said all these points are most effective for websites get affected and loose the PR.

[pestindia86]

hi,
very good step given by you and this is very useful for us,thanks

[JerrickYeoh]

i been fighting for SEO before 31st of Jan because i found someone share that they aspect will be algorithm change or new google panda again .
Hope we will pass through the 1st round of 2012. Stay safe and work hard for the coming few week .

[Neriabati]

Nice Information i have get about the related topic .

[realtyhawth]

I have the issue of google dancing how can i overcome that problem?

[seoservices]

its really a nice information sharing by you, thanks for the sharing this great information

[sbsl]

yes its good..thanks to share