19 Reasons Why Website Rankings And Traffic Dropped Dramatically?

The most common reasons for a dramatic drop in SEO rankings and organic traffic is recent search ranking algorithm updates, toxic, dead, spam backlinks, penalties, page loading factor, incorrect robot.txt. and many causes for rankings plummeting. Even high volume keywords have dropped in ranking and failed to drive traffic. And if you see a sudden drop in ranking and traffic for major keywords then don't panic, keep calm and restart SEO strategies, re-optimize your website to grow web traffic and conversions. Use this guide to diagnose web traffic loss and recover your Google SEO rankings. Learn to easily fix your search rankings.

Recovering traffic loss and search rankings —
The google search engine is the best traffic source for any website and blog. Today's technological and in the online world, able to drive huge organic search traffic on your website is a successful thing for publishers. And that's why if someone's website traffic and search ranking are decreasing then automatically his earnings are also going to downward and he has to bear a big loss on it. Today we'll be to find out the reason for the web traffic loss. Then you can easily fix your search rankings and recover the organic traffic.

Each and everyone wants to increase his market whether you work online or offline. But specially for online publishers, google traffic is one of the major sources to get more traffic. That's why for the success of your site you need to have top rankings on the google search engine.

For the increase of google search ranking, you need to set up your site to have fast loading and get proper search engine optimization for your website. The webmasters and site owners follow all the web development and SEO guides and so he has to rank his site better on search results. But sometimes we don't know the reason why website ranking is dropped out and it becomes hard to get recover the site by the search engine. If you too looking for the reason why your website search ranking is dropped out then you are on the right page. There are many more reasons why website search ranking or traffic is down. But here I have to tell you the most effective reasons why website searches ranking and traffic down.

Once you can find all these reasons for your website rankings, you able to fix that easily and recover the organic traffic for your website. Here I am going to tell you the top 19 reasons why website searches ranking and traffic go down. Make sure to read this article till the end. I hope this will much helpful for you to gain more traffic to your website.

If you want to boost your search rankings and want to get huge traffic for your website, you need to optimize your website first and re-correct some silly mistakes. Sometimes the reason is difficult to find and you don’t get to know why your website does not get huge traffic and why it’s ranking drops, again and again, even after all the things are right according to your website.

19 Reasons Sudden Drop In Website Traffic

Your website traffic also makes a big impact on your income. Everyone wants to increase their business whether it may online business or offline business. Google search engine has one of the important sources, to grow your online business and website. There are many reasons and some typical problems that your website search ranking goes down. What's the reason behind it? Why is your web search ranking down? No worry! you will get all these answers, on this page.

Fixing dramatically drop in search rankings and organic traffic:

1. Unaware of Google Algorithm updates.

Google regularly developing and improving day to day its search engine structure in various terms to improve strategies for showing the best results by making changes in its ranking algorithms. Google has often made changes in the types of results based on user behavior. Many sites got benefits but also several sites have been hurt by these changes and suffered from lower site rankings.

Google releases several SEO & search algorithm updates regularly throughout the year to bring about noticeable changes within search results. And to check whether your website is affected by Google's core updates you need to follow the recent changes carefully made by Google Search Algorithm Updates.

To avoid being damaged by Google’s updates, use effective cross-channel marketing and traffic strategy, which includes social media and other marketing channels. I use the simple technique to find whether the site is attacked by algorithm or not is that analyzing other websites. Specially check the infected websites and find out the similarity between all of those sites. Find the errors and correct those on your website.

You also need to know; [Update] Google Algorithm: Know Broad Core Search Algorithm Updates | Hummingbird | Facts

2. Dead backlinks.

Every time whenever you publish the pages, no guaranty that there will be backlinks for your published page.

In addition to that, you might have seen the site owner where you published guest posts can remove your link from his site. Also, you have lost your links of backlinks you had created on other blogging platforms and social sites. Then there is a possibility that will be down the ranking of your site.

You can find out through online tools for finding lost backlinks that will help you to discover the dropped links in the last 90 days.

Check out Why Buying Backlinks Will Not Help You With Search Engine Rankings

3. Tracking the wrong keywords.

Your website niche shows the one and you write on other topics. You need to write as per your blog niche and avoid writing unrelated topics.

This is the most important reason why your site ranking is decreased; because you are going to tracking incorrect ranking.

It is a possibility that you use the wrong keywords that it is not relevant to your site. Google doesn't like this type of writeups published on the website or blog where there is information/comments about the technology and your content is about football.

4. Development errors.

Your website settings are also essential to optimize as it some times prevents the search engines to access your content.

• ROBOT.TXT
  Check your robot.txt file and make sure all the user agents are allowed to access all your site content easily.
  Robot.txt file allows the search engine to crawl your content and links fast.
• Redirect error
  Your website URL is 'www.yourdomain.com', but what if I use only 'yourdomain.com' and hit the enter to open? Will it open the same site.
  Make sure the redirects are working smoothly and all URLs are redirecting to the right link.
• Crawl errors
  The Search Console (Google webmaster tool) helps you detect all your crawling errors like; 404 not found errors, server errors, duplicate content errors, redirect error. You need to fix these errors as early as possible.

5. 404 not found links.

As time goes on, you regularly update your site and pages for better page views and friendly user-experiences for your readers. You used to restructure your page content, redesign, and add more related links of other pages into it. If you often relaunch, rebrand, or redesign your site, you may lose some links along the way. When you try to attach your site links to different pages, you might be seen sometimes that the links become broken or not reachable. As a result of this, it directs users to an error page.

A lost link (dead links = 404 not found links) is a link that no longer refers to your site to rank on search engines. Losing links or having dead links are the biggest reason to get a sudden down in your referral traffic.

The reader failed to reach that particular page makes a negative impact on user experience and so ultimately your site start goes down in search results. You really need to analyze and find out all the broken links that are not referring to the actual page and fix it immediately.

To gain more traffic, you have to focus on your link building strategy and formulate more interlinks to your internal pages of the site or to make up for any lost link you and simply add redirection as well.

You may also like to know; Top 9 Best Link Building Tools for Better SEO | Improve Your Search Rankings

6. Broken redirects.

Redirection is the method of forwarding one URL to another URL. And the broken redirection error is generated when a link is not found and redirects that generate errors (404 not found) so the user reach at the wrong page or dead page.

Redirecting links are links that lead to pages with 301, 302, or any other HTTP status error codes. The 301 or 401 refer to the HTTP status code of the redirected page & indicates the permanent moving of a web page from one location to another. Broken redirects negatively impact user experience. And so you can see the decrease in your website traffic.

In simple terms, a 301 or 401 redirect tells the browser that “This page has been moved permanently"- called "Moved Permanently redirect status". These kinds of broken links are the most affecting reason to down your referral website traffic. You should confirm that on your website, every link and all labels have been properly hyperlinked and are in working condition. While updating the target links on source pages always ensures that every link is facing to the targetted destination page by avoiding all other redirects. Not only help your readers, but all type of search engine can then easily able to crawl all your pages immediately. It will then helps to grow your website traffic fast.

Always ensure that all your 301 or 401 redirects properly and are mapped correctly. Keep an eye on the link structure of your inbound links to make sure, they are working correctly even with your new and well-designed website format.

7. Page Speed.

Can the pagespeed of your website really have that much of an effect on SEO? You need to work on your site to load faster and so you will see much improvement in traffic and search engine rankings.

Nowadays people want quick information on the internet. It is your responsibility to give your audience quick info through your website. Making the website faster resulted in a 63% increase in organic traffic. Once they found the delay loading your pages even for one second, it makes a bad impression on them, and they will not show interest to come on your website again. So your website page loading time is much important for your viewers.

As Google already announced that PAGESPEED is one of the major factors for search rankings. Your page speed affects both the conversion rate and SEO. Site loading has a significant impact on how long your visitors stay on your page. As you see the mobile web browsing is now passed desktop traffic in volume your page speed specially on mobile devices affect how your readers and visitors interact with your website. Thus, improving the site loading speed can help increase both organic traffic and the conversion rate for your website and so the search rankings.

How to speed up your website loading? It all depends upon the type of your website as well as HTML structure and also the size of the images you're published on your page. When your page takes much time to load, visitors can leave from your site, that affect user experience. And so the Google search ranking goes down. To speeds up website performance and to check your page speed, try using Google’s new and improved PageSpeed Tool, and make improvements according to it.

8. Website redesign.

Website redesigning is the method of updating and modifying the HTML structure, navigation, format, and theme of your website by optimizing the page loading speed, SEO to have better performance & more conversion rate.

More than 55% of web traffic is driving from mobile devices and if you looking to get that mobile traffic you have to build your website mobile-friendly as early as possible. Those sites which are not following the guidelines and failed to have a mobile version i.e. responsive or mobile-friendly design are not able to catch organic search traffic and are badly affected because of search ranking drop.

If you want to change your website HTML, template, or any design according to your page, make sure it must be user friendly as well as mobile-friendly and should not affect user experience. Sometimes, whatever you make changes according to your website, Google always checks and if it is not perfect and lacks user-friendliness, then your ranking will go down.

9. Simple technical SEO issue.

Technical SEO is nothing but the process of optimizations of the connection between the website and server that helps search engine bots to crawl and index your website pages more effectively.

Must know: 15 On-Site Technical SEO Elements For Conducting Successful Audit

Search engines are becoming more sophisticated. Technical search engine optimization is changing in terms of website ranking and it's optimization. Sometimes unknowingly, there are technical SEO mistakes that can prevent your website to open and so give a dead indication to all search engines which makes a bad impact, and Google and other search engines have down our site ranking. Technical SEO decides how the content, info, metadata, site structure, and format is derived to the search engine to crawl and index immediately.

Spam link building, structured data markup, bad navigation, faulty redirection, broken links, messy URLs, dead links, slow page loading speed, and many more; these technical issues, are the reasons for not growing your web traffic on your site, you have to fix all these problems ASAP. Being aware of technical SEO issues should help you take better care of the connection between your website to search engines and keep your rankings up.

10. Manual actions.

Any search engine including Google, Bing, Yahoo takes a manual action against any website when a reviewer on that particular search engine has found the pages of a website are not compliant with search guidelines and ranking algorithms.

For most online businesses, organic traffic from search engines is very significant, but achieving high rankings in Google or any is not as easy as it used to be before. Nobody wants manual action or specially a Google penalty. Sometimes Google has penalized your site. There are two main penalties you can get. The first one is a manual action from Google’s spam team and the second one is an algorithmic penalty. To find out if your website that penalized by a manual action, go to Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Console) and check to see if you have any new notifications in the security section.

Whenever you are addressing a manual or algorithmic penalty from the Google search engine, you have to analyze your website backlinks and identify the dead ones that causing your rankings to drop. Once you identify the links, try to remove them.

11. Niche competition.

You may be doing everything in the right way according to your website and your niche, but still, you losing huge traffic and see a deep dip in your rankings. One reason for this might have, that your other competitors are doing a great job on their website as compared to you for the same niche.

When your competitors are giving too much on the same topic or they do their best on their quality content, then it is the possibility that readers will no longer stay on your web pages. Obviously, maximum users would prefer to go on your competitor websites.

To gain more traffic on your site, you also need to keep an eye on your competitors by analyzing and monitoring their social media activity, link building strategies, and content marketing. You can or learn to use various online tools to see what changes your competitors have made. Once you understand what your competition has done, make better modifications to your website, and update your content according to it. It helps to gain more attention from the search engine and so the traffic on your site.

12. Server Issue.

Whatever data and information that you publish on the internet, it crawled and indexed in the Google server. Sometimes servers not able to run properly, and it affects your web appearance damaging user experience and website ranking. Many times it might be the problem of server issue. Here you need to identify and must resolve any server issues quickly.

Moreover, in the maintenance task, you should look for errors in your server logs and use Google’s fetch and render tool to test how URLs from your site rendering in SERP. Also, it is important that you have to use the best of the best SEO friendly hosting server to drive more referral and organic traffic to your website.

13. Click-through rate changes [CTR].

Google paying more attention to their users and how they having experience with websites. Google also checks that the visitors are getting satisfied or not with your content using Bounce Rate. How much your readers spend their time to read your content on your site is also important for SEO rankings. If you facing "Search Console Impression dropped significantly" then see if your site’s click-through rate (CTR) has dropped, and look in your Google search console for the last 90 days.

Google bot applies a lower rank to your website as it is based on user feedback. CTR can be changed according to your website activities, and there are many reasons other than that. It may your web page taking too long to load, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Domain Authority, Page Authority, or as min as you might change the title recently. These and many reasons can be affected by your website click-through rate. Make sure to change website activities properly and it should be user friendly for all your visitors.

14. External link quality.

You must aware of the bad quality link penalty. Not all links are formulated equal. If you use risky, spammy, or any outdated link on your site, Google will penalize your site and then it will remove your page links from the search result. It is obvious, that your website ranking will go down immediately.

Google always clear about spammy or fake links. Once Google found such links, you not able to post any link on your website and it affects your website traffic. So, find and monitor SPAMMY external links by building new and valuable, and related ones.

15. Wrong HTML meta tags.

Meta information or meta tags are used to tell search engines, what information your site will provide to users. One of the most important types of meta tags that will help to raise your SEO rankings is the title tag.

Metadata is important, not only these HTML meta tags but the right and well-structured tags you need to consider to add in your article. Be careful about the wrong, spam meta tags on your site, because it will down the ranking on your site significantly.

You should use more specific title tags that include your target keyword. If you use the same title for multiple pages, not only will you confuse your users, you end up competing with yourself in the SERPs. So, choose compelling and right meta tags to get higher ranking on your site.

Know about SEO HTML Meta Tags - Meta Keywords To Improves Search Ranking

16. Server overload.

If your server is not setting up properly or if there is a sudden increase in traffic, it could overload and crash.

If your site experiences too much downtime, it will negatively affect your search rankings. This can happen when your site gets listed and able to get featured on the most popular websites. You will get sudden traffic but your server should able to handle a huge load. You need to choose strong, stable, secure web hosting while building and maintaining your website.

17. Bounce rate.

The bounce rate doesn't similar all the time, it goes slow down and it depends upon your content quality. You have to know the bounce rate refers to how you offered the best and helpful content to your visitors and how much they satisfied with it.

Make sure to produce the unique, helpful, and quality content so that your visitors and existing readers will keep staying on your page and the bounce rate can be decreased.

Check: 8 Reasons Why Visitors Bounce From Your Page

18. Traffic source.

Google has also check how you drive the traffic and from what sources your readers are coming. That means what kind of source you use to drive the traffic on your site - referral sites. Because Google also knew that if you not promoting your link & content on other social networking sites, your website will not able to gain huge traffic.

There are many more sources to make more traffic to your site, they're email marketing, referral links, direct traffic, organic search, paid search, social media (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... ... ), etc.

19. Duplicate content.

There is no sympathy for duplicate content.

Google easily identify duplicate content. Whenever the content is duplicated intentionally to manipulate rankings and to increase organic traffic, your site and internal pages will get penalized.

Your rankings will suffer and in the worst-case scenario, your site can be removed entirely from Google’s index and will no longer be found in search. Make sure to create compelling and organic content that people will love to read it.

Bottom Line

Every blogger wants to gain huge traffic on their website and wants to make huge money from their website. Even, if there is any business blogger, they're always trying to increase their sales online and try to make big money from it. Search engine optimization [SEO] and your website traffic are the most important things to get your blog page on the top in the list of Google search results. If you can do balance with these things your page absolutely earn a higher rank in the Google search list.

If you want to top on google ranking then you have to follow the tips of the guideline. Do not use tips and tricks to fool Google. It's better to write your quality content and while posting online content focus on visitor satisfaction, increased user engagement to satisfy your readers on your site.