Violations Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
It’s normal to experience small fluctuations in your rankings due to the ever-changing search algorithm landscape. So if your rankings dropped one or two spots, I recommend keeping an eye on it, but not panicking just yet. You might see your page go back to its original spot in a few days. However, a significant drop — think five or more spots — requires your immediate attention. To accurately watch your rankings, you need to use SEO tools that track the performance of your keywords over time. I go over how to track your keyword rankings in a previous post. With a clear understanding of your situation, you can then move forward with investigating and finding the possible causes for this sudden change.
Step #2: Identifying Webmaster Guidelines
lay out the best practices to help Google find, index, and rank your site. Violating these guidelines can negatively impact your site’s ranking in Google search results, or even lead to removal from Google’s search results. Below is a breakdown of how I differentiate webmaster guideline violations. Google’s guidelines cover three main areas — content and design, technical, and quality. Content and design guidelines provide recommendations for building a site with a robust information architecture that’s helpful to users. Technical guidelines mainly focus on allowing search engines to crawl and index your site. Quality guidelines offer advice to prevent manipulative practices, such as duplicating content from other websites, keyword stuffing, or creating tricky redirects – often known as black-hat SEO tactics.
You could use Google Search Console to look
for any crawl errors, manual actions, or security issues that might affect Google’s ability to index your site. Many of the SEO tools I use also have audit functions, which I often use to identify any issues with my on-page, off-page, and technical SEO factors. If your self-audit unveils any issues, it’s essential to get them fixed quickly, and following Google’s guidelines. By aligning your website’s SEO strategy with Google’s Guidelines, you’re doing white-hat SEO, and making sure your strategy will keep from unnecessary drops in ranking in the future. Step #3: Checking for Algorithm Updates Google is known to frequently update its search algorithm to improve the quality, relevance, and accuracy of its search results.
These updates can range from minor tweaks that
go almost unnoticed to significant shake-ups that cause drastic shifts in search rankings. The most recent ones to date are the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and the November 2023 Core Update. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how you can stay informed about these important changes: Stay updated with SEO news platforms like this blog, Search Engine Journal, and or Search Engine Roundtable. These platforms usually provide immediate news on Google algorithm updates along with expert insights and advice on how to tweak your SEO strategy in line with the changes. Follow Google’s Official Communications as it often announces significant changes on its official blog or Twitter accounts.
So, regularly follow Google Search Central Blog and
notable members of Google’s Search bulgaria phone number library Relation team like Danny Sullivan and John Mueller. Use Algorithm Monitoring Tools like SEMRush’s Sensor to track Google’s search results and algorithm changes, interpreting these into easy-to-understand weather-like reports. The “hotter” and “stormier” the forecast, the more significant the changes in Google’s rankings. Step #4: Audit your Backlinks Backlinks, which are links from other websites pointing to yours, are a significant ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. They essentially act like votes of trust and quality, indicating your site’s authority and relevance. Here’s how to verify and manage lost backlinks: Use Backlink Analysis Tools. Several SEO tools offer backlink tracking functionalities.
One of the notable examples is Ahrefs. This tool
could help in monitoring your backlink profile, keeping track of the websites linking to you, and crucially, any backlinks you’ve recently lost. Identify Lost Backlinks using SEO tools that can run regular checks to identify lost backlinks. Lost backlinks can occur for various reasons – the linking page might have been removed, the link might have been deleted, or the site could have gone offline. Analyzing Lost Backlinks is also crucial. Once you’ve identified the lost backlinks, it is time for you to analyze the quality and relevance of your referring domains. If they are high-quality, losing these links could have contributed to your rankings drop.
Remember, the goal of any good SEO strategy
isn’t just to gain backlinks, but to honesty and transparency building trust in business gain high-quality, relevant ones, and importantly, ensure they stick around. Regularly verifying your backlinks can thus be a crucial part of your SEO health check and recovery plan. You might have noticed I didn’t include disavowing links to this step. That’s because it’s not a recommended strategy anymore. If you do notice links coming from very bad sites (such as hacked sites, or sites with malware or porn), then you should disavow those. Otherwise, if your links are coming from low-quality or unrelated sites, then you can ignore them. It used to help in the past when negative SEO was a thing.
But nowadays, Google’s algorithm enables it to devalue
links. In a way, they themselves have a china phone numbers disavow algorithm. Step #5: Rebuilding or Replacing Lost Backlinks Once you’ve identified lost backlinks, especially high-quality ones, you need to mitigate their loss to recover your keyword rankings. I go over how to reclaim backlinks in another guide, but here’s a quick breakdown of that process: Reach Out to Website Owners: If a valuable backlink was removed unknowingly or accidentally by a website owner, reaching out to them can be a good starting point. Politely mention the removal of benefits the link can bring, such as a better user experience, useful resources for readers, and improved site engagement.