![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/medical-bag.jpg\" "\\"medical-bag\\"")
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If your website has suffered a drop in rankings recently don\u2019t panic, read through this guide and get a better picture of what is happening behind the scenes. Prepare yourself for any future search result hiccups with our 10 Emergency SEO First Aid Tips<\/strong> and avoid paying someone else to diagnose the problem.<\/p>\n Check If you see nothing at all or just your homepage<\/strong> then it\u2019s serious \u2013 you need to work fast to salvage your online presence, especially if your business is e-commerce. This is a good indication that your site has been banned from the Google index\u2026 have you been a naughty boy?<\/p>\n If you see lots of your pages in the Google index<\/strong> then you can breathe a small sigh of relief \u2013 it\u2019s unlikely to require surgery, just a course of antibiotics and a bit of physio. Search for your domain name (but without the If you are in both the index and the normal search results<\/strong>, but you\u2019ve still lost significant rankings on quite a few keywords, then it\u2019s likely Google has devalued a bunch of high profile links to your website. Check any under-the-table paid links you might have purchased. If they\u2019re of no value anymore then put the money to better use. Build local citations<\/a>, as they\u00a0help Internet users to discover local businesses and can also impact search engine rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The search engine algorithms change every couple of days and often a drop in ranking is nothing to worry about. Micro-managing your search positions will just add stress and knee-jerk reactions to your digital marketing, so give it a couple of days to settle unless the drop is significant enough to hit your sales.<\/p>\n Google Webmaster Tools<\/a> will show you when your site was last spidered by Googlebot, and any problems it encountered. Investigate any errors to see if it\u2019s indicative of a larger problem with your website. There\u2019s also a chance it might tell you if you\u2019ve been flagged as spam.<\/p>\n Check with your designers and web developers if anything has been recently implemented. Often they roll out new code, page redirects, clever things with user-agents or IP addresses etc. and don\u2019t think the marketing team needed to know. Find out what changed and change it back or fix the offending elements.<\/p>\n Make it your company policy to keep everyone aware of new website developments as a matter of course.<\/p>\n Sometimes this is easy to determine and other times it\u2019s not so obvious. Generally if you see your entire website drop around 30 places in Google\u2019s search results for a number of keywords then it\u2019s a fair assumption you\u2019ve been given a slap on the wrist for gaming the system too aggressively. Stop what you\u2019re doing until things settle; after that take it a bit easier in your grey hat tactics.<\/p>\n However, if Google decides to drop your website from the index entirely you need to act quickly, as getting back into the search results can be a slow burn. SEOmoz suggests asking yourself these questions before trying to diagnose:<\/p>\n If the answer to these is yes, here\u2019s what you need to do:<\/p>\n It\u2019s entirely possible you\u2019ve restricted the friendly spiders from finding your content. Check www.yourdomain.com\/robots.txt for any rules that are too wide. Sometimes you can accidentally restrict all spiders in an attempt to restrict specific spiders and bots like the waybackmachine or third-party scrapers. Google Webmaster Tools<\/a> has a neat little robot.txt tester so you can develop your spider restrictions in a safe environment before setting them live.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re in an industry where none of the players have a clue about SEO then be ever watchful for them getting clever. It\u2019s easy to think you\u2019ve got the search results dominated if you\u2019re the only one putting any effort into your SEO strategy. A big wake-up call to one of your more formidable competitors could drop your rankings as they enter the game guns blazing.<\/p>\n The Google algorithm tries very hard to avoid results that have the same content. It tries to work out the canonical version and places the rest in the supplemental index never to be viewed by the majority of the public. However unlikely, it\u2019s always worth checking if you\u2019re running out of options.<\/p>\n To quote Google directly\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n “… If you find that another site is duplicating your content by scraping (misappropriating and republishing) it, it’s unlikely that this will negatively impact your site’s ranking in Google search results pages. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google’s index<\/a> …” You can check by typing this into Google\u2026Assess the damage<\/strong><\/h3>\n
site:www.yourdomain.com<\/code> on Google to see if your website is still in the index.<\/p>\nsite:<\/code> prefix) and if you\u2019re not there you\u2019ve probably had your wrist slapped for dodgy SEO tactics. Consider it a gentleman\u2019s warning that your rankings have plummeted, and you should take the opportunity to fix things as soon as you can. Use tips on managing\u00a0GMB listings<\/a> to your advantage.<\/p>\nTemporary algorithm shift<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Check Google Webmaster Tools<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Have you changed anything?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Check if you\u2019ve been penalised as spam<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Check your robots.txt file<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Competition<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Duplicate Content<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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\n\"an original sentence from your website\" -site:www.yourdomain.com<\/code><\/p>\nDevalued inbound links<\/strong><\/h3>\n