Why has your website’s SEO dropped?

Your website is dropping in Google, why?
Your site has disappeared from the first pages of Google, calls are dropping, internet orders are plummeting, the impact is being felt on overall sales, and you don’t understand why you’ve dropped from the first page to eighth. You call in your in-house specialist, but his answers don’t suit you.

Why the website’s position has dropped in Google

But if Google, Bing and the other search engines, which use more or less the same algorithms, take you down 5 or 6 pages in Internet searches, that’s serious!
Here are the main reasons why:

• You’ve just created a new site or renovated it, the design is superb but you’ve lost all the benefit of your old site and the history you created, but the real reason is the fault of your site creator who dropped the old pages. The solution is to reconnect old URLs using 301 redirects. Wait 1 or 2 months and it should get better.
• You’ve lost quality links. As you know, quality links to your site help you climb Google’s rankings, but everything’s always changing. Some of these sites close, some of these links disappear, so you always have to work to renew them.
• Losing poor-quality links is even worse than losing good links, because Google will penalize you, at least for the pages targeted. Bad links are artificial links that have no relevance to your site and are designed to promote sites artificially. Google says that if your site is targeted by some of these links, delete them first unless you want to be penalized. Too many poor-quality, irrelevant links will also be detected and treated as spamming by Panda, Google’s tool, version 4.2 of which is expected in 2016, and you’ll be penalized.
• Your copywriter has written too many identical keywords on the same page, and Google has classified this as spamming. Some specialists believe that you should not exceed a content density of 9% with the same words.
• Your webmaster has created internal links between pages that refer to each other, which can also be assimilated to spamming; some companies have seen their page rank rise after deleting certain contentious pages. This doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just that you must remain balanced.
• You’re being penalized either manually or automatically by Google. A sign that you’re being penalized is that, whatever your query, you’re always after the 30th position. If you think you’re being unjustifiably penalized, you can contact Google via the Webmaster Console.
• You’ve deleted content and become an empty shell, which Google rightly penalizes. It’s a good idea to have a sufficient percentage of written content in relation to code.
• Don’t worry about 404 errors showing missing urls, they don’t penalize you and you can redirect them to 301 to provide a better visitor experience.
• You have no social links to justify to Google your reality and your interaction in the community, Google wonders if you’re not a fictitious creation.
• If you have a multilingual site and your operator has deactivated the hreflang tags that allow foreign visitors to switch automatically from one page to another in their own language, the drop in visits is immediate!
• The designer of your site has made architectural errors in your site, limiting the ability of robots to navigate all pages and showing Google that the site is not very functional and offers a poor visitor experience. Get your site structure up to speed – it’s urgent!
• New competitors have appeared, the market is limited and if a good competitor occupies my same niche with a better SEO specialist, he will position himself in front of you and take your customers.

In conclusion, SEO requires regular monitoring of the traffic on your site, check whether your positioning in Google is decreasing or increasing in your main queries, don’t just rely on what your technicians tell you, take basic SEO training and hire good SEO specialists, if you find it expensive to go through a specialist evaluate the cost of losing your turnover and ask yourself the question of the impact on your career!

Jean-Pierre Mercier

Our online SEO training