Reasons why your rankings dropped!

Search engine traffic is one of the most valuable and targeted sources of traffic. This is because people generally trust web pages which garner one of the top spots in their search engine of choice. It takes a lot of time and efforts, sometimes money too in link building, search engine ranking and building your social search reputation on social networks. Thus if it so happens that your search engine traffic disappears overnight, without being properly diversified in the kinds of traffic you tap, you will find yourself in a fix. This is why understanding beforehand what could be the possible reasons in a drop in SEO ranking helps.

• The most common reason to explain your site’s disappearance is the change in the search engine's algorithms. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms which dictate where pages rank for keywords in the search engine results pages in order to keep things fresh and ensure that the best content is kept at the top. Even if your site isn't being directly affected by an algorithm update, sites which you get a lot of your links from could be which can diminish the amount of link juice which you have overnight, so your SEO ranking will be very likely drop with it.

• Most recently the Google farmer update, also known as the Panda Update, had a huge impact on duplicate content and spamming content. Especially sites with huge amounts of sub par content with an emphasis on quantity over quality therefore now content farms as well as the millions of websites receiving link juice from them were seriously affected practically overnight.

• Do ascertain that you don't have any bonehead mistakes in your robot.txt which may be prohibiting search engine ranking crawlers from gaining access to certain pages of your site.

• Broken links can cause serious problems, especially if it's a prominent internal link on your site.

• Duplicate Content is much hated by search engines like Google and affects SEO ranking. This is especially true when it happens on the same site, but it can be an issue on different websites, as well. Not only does this upset Google, but when it finds duplicate content in two or more locations online, Google has to determine which is the true original content, and it may not always be your site that gets the credit, regardless of whether you put that content on your site first or not; so this can have adverse effects on your rankings in a couple of ways.

• The Google Dance refers to the phenomenon of pages randomly jumping around different spots in the SERPs, sometimes drastically. Typically, if the Google dance is the culprit for your search engine ranking drop, the good news is that you'll regain your higher rankings shortly. It's just a random shuffling and fluctuation of listings which usually doesn't last long.