The Roller Coaster Ride of Website Ranking

There are many reasons why your site might lose search engine result rankings. Some of those reasons can be traced to a particular fault while others just occur in the natural course of things. But understanding what causes typical loss can give us a better insight into the fluctuations that are so common and help prevent serious long-term effects caused by a sudden drop in search engine rankings.

The reasons for the ups and downs in ranking really comes down to three things. Your site changes, competitors' sites change, or the search engine algorithm changes. Or it could be any combination of those three.

1. Site Changes

In most cases routine changes have minimal effect, but there are times when a major change is implemented that the entire optimization of a page, or even website, needs to be re-evaluated. Some of the most common of these major changes are site re-designs—especially when URL changes are involved—moving or removing pages, or drastically changing the copy across your site.

Site changes that can affect rankings also include your site's backlinks. Adverse effects can occur when large numbers of paid or bartered links suddenly get removed. Many of the links you previously had secured can suddenly disappear. The loss of these links can be enough to cause search engine rankings to drop significantly. But worse, this sudden change in the link profile may flag your site as having a possible unnatural linking profile that will need further examination and/or filtering. Consider diversifying your backlinks and gaining some natural backlinks that will remain indefinitely.

In some cases ranking drops may be due to nothing more than your website being inaccessible when the search engines try to spider your content. Usually a single instance of this will not affect your rankings. However if your site is down repeatedly during crawl times you may have a serious issue. This is because if the search engine cannot spider your site then they've got nothing in which to analyze for ranking placement. Therefore it is essential to have a good web host provider.

2. Competitor changes

You're not the only site on the web so don't be surprised when you suddenly find someone else ranking above you. There are a lot of factors working against any one site due to competition. Everybody wants that coveted first page placement.

Every day new competitors come online with a new website, or new pages. Many of these target the same keyphrases as you. With every new page added to the web and therefore indexed by the search engines it introduces one more piece of competition in the search engine ranking field. How well any of these pages compete in comparison to your pages can cause you to lose (or gain) a spot or two in positioning.

Not only that you may find yourself competing against industry related info sites, blogs, hobby pages, etc. So you are encouraged to build a very robust, information rich, authoritative website to help you maintain your ranking dominance.

This will help also when the search engines go on the hunt to determine which sites are most relevant to any particular search. While we may not agree with their decisions in that regard, the fact remains that other websites may be determined, for whatever reason, to be more relevant than yours.

3. Change in search algorithms

Search engines are constantly evolving. These evolutions are mostly compromised of small changes to how certain ranking factors are weighted and scored, or the addition and/or removal of other ranking factors all together. Other times, however, the changes can be significant, causing mass upheaval of search results across the board.

For the most part these small changes are not meant to cause much of a stir. They are just fine-tuning adjustments to enhance search results. Most sites weather these changes easily enough, but not all sites. With every change made, each site in the search index is subject to be scored according to the new algorithm. If there is something in your site's profile that runs afoul of the new algorithm then your site can get dropped due to the offending issue, whatever that may be.

Hiccups are the unexplainable drops in rankings. Most hiccups result in a site completely disappearing from the search results for all previous ranked terms. Hiccups such as this are usually temporary. Some sites lose rankings for up to four weeks at a time only to come right back to their previous positions, without any changes having been made before or after.

Why does this happen? They could be caused from any of the issues above, or perhaps a ghost from a historical profile making an appearance in the current algorithm. Whatever the cause hiccups, while frustrating, are usually nothing to be worried about. You simply have to wait them out.

At the End of The Day

Almost every site owner will, at one time or another, find themselves facing significant ranking drops. Panicking should be the last thing that you do.

Many people, when seeing sudden drops in rankings, make drastic changes in their website in order to compensate. This is never advised. The first thing you need to do is to research the issue, identify what (as much as can be determined) caused the problem and then carefully plan out a course of action, if any, which needs to be taken.