Problems With The Deterioration Of Site Rankings

Web site drop in position

In general, you should not focus too much on your absolute position, or even small fluctuations in position. Impressions, clicks and total visitor count are, in the end, the ultimate measure of success for your site. However, if you do see a dramatic, persistent drop in position, you can try to address it. Drops in position are often caused by one of the following reasons:

• Another site has improved their quality or relevance more than yours. Perform some search queries in incognito mode, see which sites are performing better than yours, and try to determine why that is so: are the other results more useful, complete, or up-to-date than yours?
• Your site has content that has become stale, incorrect, or less useful than it used to be. Try to keep your site accurate, useful, and up to date.
• Google is having problems finding or reading your site. This will be seen as an increase in indexing errors in the Index Coverage report. If you recently made changes to your site, give us a few weeks to update our index. You can follow our progress in the Index Coverage report.
• You used to qualify for search appearance features (which generally have a higher position) but no longer do so. Examine your site’s rich result reports and AMP report to ensure that you haven’t introduced any new errors.
• Your site’s mobile usability has decreased, making the site less useful for mobile visitors.
• There has been a drop in the number or quality of sites that link to you. You can see who is linking to your site here.
• There was a change to our ranking or reporting algorithms. See if a change is mentioned in the Webmaster Central blog and our data anomalies page; otherwise, follow best practices in the Webmaster Guidelines and Google search quality rater guidelines.

Check your traffic data and see if your drop is tied to a specific factor (query, page, country, or device). If so, try to determine the root cause.

Read our quality guidelines to learn what Google value in a website.

Follow the recommendations in the SEO starter guide, particularly the recommendations on optimizing your content.