How to Troubleshoot Dropped Search Engine Rankings

Are you baffled about a recent drop in your search engine
rankings? Do you know where to start and get a handle on what
the problem might be and how to remedy it? One option to
consider is using search engine forums as a resource. They are
full of questions from people who have experienced similar
situations and are great resources for an answer or two. But
let's say you really want to get to the bottom of the problem
and you want to do it yourself. The following are some of the
beginning steps StepForth takes when evaluating dropped
rankings.

Retrace Your Steps

Write a list of everything that anyone has done to your site
within the past 3 weeks. Now look for anything that could have
negatively impacted your content, site structure, or the
reliability of your URLs. Once you write down the course of
events the answer might pop right out at you. Here are some
common situational culprits:

* You just moved your website to a different hosting
provider: did your site experience much, if any, downtime
during the switch over? Quality hosting companies will allow
you to setup your site on their servers before the switch
takes place so that downtime is minimized if not removed
entirely. If a search engine happened to visit your site
while it was down, there is a small chance your rankings
would be negatively affected, but it will only happen for a
short period. Once the search engine re-indexes your website
everything should be back in order.

* The structure of your site has permanently changed: did you
redirect the traffic from the old URLs to the new URLs using
a 301 redirect? If not, then you should. A 301 redirect is a
permanent redirect which tells any visiting search engine
to permanently change its index to reflect the new site
structure.

* Contact your hosting company to check if your server has
had any downtime recently. In most cases search engines
will not drop your rankings if they visit your site and it
is offline once; however, if this happens consistently then
your rankings can fail. If your hosting company states that
downtime has occurred, then you have at least one possible
answer for your ranking woes. As long as your site is now
reliably online and has not been offline for an extended
period (days or weeks) the rankings should reappear as your
site is re-indexed. There may be a notable drop in rankings
but, in most cases, they will return to pre-incident status.

Check Your Content

Is all of your textual content up to date? It is amazing just
how quickly a website's rankings can drop when someone
accidentally overwrites optimized pages with older,
non-optimized pages. Check the content and if you find old
content, just overwrite it with the newer content and wait for
the search engines to come back and re-index your website;
Google and Yahoo are likely to come back within a week or even
a day.

Check Your Server Headers

When a search engine visits your website it must first respond
to any commands provided by your server. These commands are
often identifiable in the server header. As a result, we like to
verify that no incorrect, unusual or unnecessary commands are
stashed in the header of your site. We use the free SEO
Consultants Check Server Headers Tool
(http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp) to review any
headers and take action if required, but there are others
(http://www.google.com/search?q=server+header+checker&sourceid=
navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2007-36,GGGL:en) freely
available as well.

Search Engine Webmaster Tool Resources

If you have not already done so, I strongly recommend claiming
your website on Yahoo Site Explorer
(http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/), Google Webmaster Central
(http://www.google.com/webmasters/) and Live Search Webmaster
Center (http://webmaster.live.com/). Each of these fine resources
provides extremely useful feedback (from each respective search
engine's perspective) for site owners such as:

* Whether your site is currently banned. If you are, in some
cases they will tell you why.
* Notes on any impediments the search engine has experienced
when trying to index your website.
* Who is linking to your website.
* Which pages are the most popular on your website.
* Which keywords lead the most traffic to your website.

In addition, these free webmaster resources allow you to submit
an XML sitemap (http://news.stepforth.com/tools/#sitemap) of
your website so that you can ensure no pages are missed when the
search engines index your website.

Search Your Site for SPAM

It is possible that your site has been "lucky" enough not to
have been penalized until now for certain content
transgressions. You see, search engines don't always catch SPAM
right away. In fact, I occasionally find myself shaking my head
in disbelief when I see blatantly spammy sites appearing in the
top 10 search results. Your site may not be entirely spammy but
all it takes is for one transgression to come to light for a
search engine to penalize your search engine rankings. What SPAM
is and how to identify it is an article unto itself so here are
some helpful resources for you to review:

* 15 Shades of SEO SPAM (http://news.stepforth.com/blog/
2006/01/15-shades-of-seo-spam.php) by Jim Hedger (written
in 2006 but still applicable)

* Wikipedia's Definition of SPAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Spamdexing) has some great content worth reading as
well.

Contact an SEO or Request a Forum Review

If you haven't found a reasonable answer after following the
instructions above I would recommend either contacting a
reputable SEO company for advice or posting your ranking
problems publicly on a popular search marketing forum within a
resource like Webmaster World (http://www.webmasterworld.com/).
There are a lot of people on forums that can be incredibly
helpful and may have an answer for you. But a word to the wise,
make sure the person providing advice has a solid reputation.
I strongly recommend reviewing a number of their previous posts
and Googling them to ensure they have suitable experience to
provide advice – unless of course you have a 'no duh' moment
where their advice makes perfect sense.

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