Search Engine Optimisation and Losing Your Rankings


By Tom Greaves

A common question that many search engine optimisation specialists receive is what happened to my rankings, with the major rank being on Google. There are many different reasons why a site may lose rankings, some are obvious and involve unethical techniques, others are less obvious and can leave some webmasters puzzled.

In this article I really wanted to focus on some of the less obvious reasons you could be seeing a drop in your rankings, no matter what the reason is it is always going to be a guess as Google tend to keep their negative ranking factors close to their chest to prevent manipulation of their search results.

Over anchor optimisation is a common reason for losing rankings. Every good SEO knows that in order to rank high on Google you need to make your links as relevant as possible, this includes making good use of your anchor text. However if you over do it and create thousands of identical anchor links you are risking a penalty, especially if the anchor does not correspond with your website name.

If you have a new site and you are filling it with quality, unique content then you really need to keep an eye on your content being scrapped and published on another site. This will make it look like duplicate content and end in your page being thrown out of the index. This is hard to battle against, carrying out random searches on the exact article name can help you find scrapped content.

A huge mistake many newbie webmasters make is filling their new site with reciprocal links, this is when you link to a page and that page links back to you in return. These sort of links have already been devalued by Google and having them in excess on a page can have a big impact on your pages ranking. Another newbie mistake is keyword stuffing, this is when your content has been unnaturally filled with the keywords you are targeting. If it looks unnatural to a user it will also look unnatural to Google and eventually you will see a drop in rankings.

If you are having trouble with your Google ranking it will be useful to look over the above pieces of advice. Failing that you should really consider the fact that your site may be in breach of Googles webmaster guidelines, have you always owned your domain? If not the person who owned it before may have been practicing unethical techniques. It can be very frustrating dealing with a Google penalty but one that often is amended in the search engine optimisation industry.



 
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