What has affected my search rankings

There is nothing worse than seeing your web traffic drop, with every evolution to search algorithms there is a chance you may lose traffic. What has affected my search ranking! Its soul destroying to see a drop after all the hard work and effort you have put in.

Before you panic and run around like a headless chicken, have your search rankings dropped or is it something else?

Make sure you have your website or blog registered on Google search console. It’s a great tool for checking how your website or blog is doing. On the main page you can see if your rankings have gone up or down, it’s simple and easy to use.

Has Google dropped your rankings? There are plenty of reasons why this can happen, let’s have a look at a few things. What, why and how to fix it. I have provided examples below, these are not in order of relevancy. All should be taken into consideration to give your content consumers the best experience. As your end user increases, new search bot crawls will factor this in to your web rankings.

Search algorithms have been updated

Search algorithms are constanly updated to keep up with technological changes to internet content and new technology. Think of html 5’s appearance in 2014, this is more on a major scale though. Recent changes will include updates to the way people are searching for content. Think of Alexa and google assistant, have you optimised your content for voice search? It’s becoming far more popular, phones now come with voice search built in. The cost of Alexa enabled devices as well as Google home and other brands are constantly coming down in price. Hence the take up of this search method is increasing.

Abusive experiences

Google can and will penalise your search ranking if it feels you are providing an abusive experience to your users.

Crawl bots will regularly index your web pages to find any new pages or posts to add to their search engine results. The search algorithms will check the relevancy of your page content and anything else you have on your pages.

Excessive advert to content ratios will lead to a mark down in your search rankings. Too many ads leads to a poor user experience, it will get you marked down. Excessive adverts on your site can also lead to slowing response / load times of your content. It can become a double negative hit on your search rankings.

Lack of updates

A review of your previous content should be taken at regular intervals, as time passes you need to make sure your content is still relevant. Either update your content of create a new updated page or post. New content is created all the time so you need to keep ahead of the competition.

Social media slowdown

Creating social media pages and interacting with users it great. It shows you are committed to your content, crawl bots see everything you post. If your content is on par with another site, they can take the edge with regular posts. Social media is also a great way to create good quality back links to your content.

Http to https, web safety

As of 2019, Google and other search engines have started to almost call out website sites not using the new HTTPS protocol. This identies your site has having an unsafe connection, ie using the older HTTP protocol. Connections via https are secure where as http is not, if you have an online shop you should get your site an SSL certificate.

Site with HTTPS will have a green closed padlock symbol in front of the URL, sites without display a warning sign. Not great for inspiring trust in your content consumers. There are ways you can get your SSL certificate and green padlock for free.

Slow response times

I mentioned in the abusive experiences section how ad heavy sites can slow down your web pages. There are other aspects that can have a negative effect.

Free web hosting? It seems like a good way of getting hosting when you are starting out, no costs are very tempting. More often than not free hosting gives you poor system resources and bandwith. All paid hosting on your hosts servers will be given priority over your website or blog. Google will pick up on this, downgrading your Web ranking accordingly as it see your webpages loading slowly.

Media heavy pages, content with high amounts of pictures etc. These pages can take far longer to load if the size of the pictures are large. If a page takes too long to load all your pictures it could harm your SEO, users will actively move away from your web page. Another double whammy.

You can help negate this by decreasing your picture sizes and enabling lazy loading on your website. Lazy loading only loads the pictures as your users scroll through the page content. You will see examples of this everywhere including Facebook.

Poor paid web hosting, before choosing your host check out the reviews. You need a minimum of 99.99% uptime, anything else will not do. It’s as bad if not worse than slowly loading pages if your site is plain unable to load at all.

Poor back links

Poor back links have a negative effect on SEO, gone are the days of back link spamming. Sites are still around that will offer to put backlinks around the internet for you. Google quickly caught on to this and will penalise you for it, they are usually on poor content site with no association with your niche. Very often they are on sexually explicit, gambling or other nefarious sites you dont want to be linked with.

The only back links you want are from similar content sites or large alternative authority websites. This includes social media.

Web address

Having your own domain name is a must, it gives credence to your web content. It’s helps to build trust with your end users. Free web hosts or website builders that offer free websites often give you a free web address. These are usually long winded names that no one will remember, it also doesn’t show users that you have faith in your own creation.

Think of buying your own domain name as an investment and paying for good web hosting as an investment in it’s future. Search algorithms will see this too.

Conclusion

So, what has affected my search ranking?The key as I have said in other articles is content. Take into consideration the points above to help your site flourish. All web users are looking for two things, a positive experience that includes the information they are seeking. Anything that affects this is a negative for them and search algorithms alike.