3 things to check when you’re website has fallen in rankings

There’s nothing worse than experiencing a loss in traffic. If you really love your search engine traffic, like I do, then a morning glance at downtrending stats can be very upsetting. Unfortunately with Google being more fussy these days, unexpected traffic stops have happened quite a bit. The main type of problems I’ve seen lately fall into these broad categories:

Canonicalization problems have sank your website

Canonicalization is not an easy word, is it? And it hasn’t always been an easy task for Google to pick the correct version of your website, especially depending on how people link to it. Truth is, most people, even competent computer professionals are largely unaware of the 301 issues, and most websites are not setup to handle streamlining the requests to one URI by use of mod_rewrite. Google is undergoing a major restructuring of how they handle the 301 issue. If you suspect you have this issue, then attempt to repair it by adding the necessary lines to .htaccess as quickly as possible.

You may have lost links, or links may be valued differently

Usually losing SERPS in this fashion is quite dramatic, and experience by many people at once. You log into your favorite Webmaster forum and you see threads such as “GOOGLE RANKINGS DROP LIKE ROCK…..PLS HELP!”. If you merely lost an “important link” to your website, you might be able to recover rapidly. Just get another link of equal or superior value. Much more insidious is if nothing has apparently changed, and now your website has just stopped ranking. This may mean that Google has changed the way the count the values of links and now your website is treated differently than before. If this is the case, you’ll need to institute new link-building techniques to try to recapture rankings.

Some traffic is seasonal or can fluctuate greatly from day to day

If the traffic fluctuations are not dramatic, this could just be the normal ebb and flow that nearly every website will experience. Don’t forget to check the obvious: has a real world event superceded the importance of using search engines for the day? Yes, events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics will be such huge draws that they’ll take visitors away from surfing the web and clicking on your ads. Don’t despair. Generally after a big event, the visitors come back in droves. Seasonal fluctuations are no big deal, but if you experience continued downturns, you’ll have to investigate what may have gone wrong.