Have you lost an important place in the SERP? Here are some possible causes.

When your site is present on the Web, it is essential to monitor the evolution of your online traffic. If the result of this study shows a sudden and unexpected decrease in your audience, take the time to analyse your situation. There are various reasons that may have caused this drop. It is then necessary to determine them in order to take the appropriate measures. The drop may be due to piracy or a breakdown.

It may be due to an update of one or more of Google’s algorithms

Google specifically uses different algorithms to rank websites. As the Internet is constantly developing and new information continues to flow in, these algorithms need to be continually updated. These changes can generally affect the results within the search engine.

If the problem is not technical, you should check with Google. It is possible that you have received a penalty from them. In fact, it is possible that your site has been subject to manual action by Google. Errors are listed in your Search Console, so you will be able to deal with them using the information there.

You may also be suffering from algorithmic penalties. These are due to updates to the engine, such as Penguin or Panda. In this case, once you have consulted the summary provided by Google, you will have to implement a new strategy to improve the visibility of your site. However, this problem can be avoided by following the search engine recommendations.

Bad things can happen because of your duplicate content

External duplication of your content is also another cause of loss of ranking. Another site may plagiarise your content in order to get traffic. The reason for this is simple, perhaps your content is attracting more and more readers or it is well written. In this case, the search engine algorithm may replace your place in the SERP with that of the content stealing site.

You should also think about checking that the problem is not your own. Indeed, the posting of a duplicated page even if it is on a development site is taken into account in the referencing. These pages also go through an indexation.

You should then contact the designer of the site that duplicated your content so that he can remove the duplicated content. You can also make a request to remove plagiarised content if the first method was not sufficient. You can check for duplicate content via tools such as: www.positeo.com

Perhaps this is due to the evolution of your competitors

Changes made by your competitors can also be the cause of a poor ranking in the search results.

You will need to analyse their sites. Study the variation of results when you search for your keywords. This will give you your position in relation to your competitors.

Sometimes competitors may have different optimization strategies in place or they may have paid particular attention to the quality of their content. Once you have identified your weaknesses, it is up to you to improve !

Today Doko Agency uses the Advenced Web Ranking tool to monitor the SERP position of its clients and their competitors.

The drop may come after you lose popularity

Your ranking in the search results depends mainly on the popularity of your website. Indeed, the establishment of backlinks allows you to generate traffic to your pages. The loss of some of these external links will have a direct impact on your ranking.

Your SEO strategy must therefore be based on restoring your popularity. There are various tools that allow you to study your backlinks such as Majestic SEO for example. Once you have identified the links that are not active, contact the webmasters to restore them.

The results you get will allow you to understand the probable causes of the decline in your popularity. This study will also help you to set up a new SEO strategy that will allow you to improve your site’s ranking.

Loic Julien