5 Reasons Your Google Rankings Can Dr...

5 Reasons Your Google Rankings Can Drop (And How To Overcome Each Of Them)
1. You lose the fresh content bonus. When you first put a piece of content online, it will often rank extremely well right out of the gate. This happens because Google has a filter in their system that gives a bonus to brand new content. You’ll notice that after a week or two, your ranking can start to slide. This happens because the fresh content bonus goes away. A lot of people panic when they find themselves in this situation. The solution is to promote the content well so that plenty of other sites link to it. Even though you lose the fresh content bonus, you can still rank well (even #1) if your piece of content has the most link strength of all the documents that are related to the keyword in question.
2. Your internal link structure changes. This reason affects most bloggers, sometimes without their knowledge. Think about it, when you first click publish, your blog creates a new page for your post and also usually lists your post on your home page. Some blogs also link to their newest posts, with a ‘Recent Posts’ section of the sidebar. This means that the home page of the site is linking to the new post, and also means that each page of the site is linking to the new post (if you’re using a ‘Recent Posts’ section).
If you publish a bunch of new posts, that will all change. The original post will fall off of the home page, and will drop out of the ‘Recent Posts’ section. When that happens, most of its link juice goes away and it won’t rank as well as it originally did. The solution is to do a better job linking to the post from within your site. ProBlogger has a great post about this concept: Interlink Your Old Blog Posts. If you’re not a blogger the same concepts still apply. You need to pass more links from within your site to your new piece of content.
3. The link structure on sites that are linking to you changes. Let’s say that some solid blogs like this post and decide to link to it - so they create some posts on their sites and link here. If that happens, their posts will be on their home pages, at least until they’re pushed off. While their posts are on their home pages, I will be getting more link juice than I will a month from now. Here in a month they will have tons of new posts and the posts that linked to me won’t be as strong as they originally were.
This happens on a lot of different types of sites. Ezine Articles is a site where you can submit a piece of content, in exchange for a link. When your article is first published on Ezine, it will be displayed prominently on the site, in fact it’s often linked to from the Ezine home page. As time goes on the article will fall deeper and deeper into the site until it settles in as just any other page on the site. At that point it will be much weaker than it was when it started out and therefore won’t pass as much link weight as it originally did.
The solution to this issue is to do a better job of promoting your piece of content. You’ll need more links to replace what was lost. Multiple links from blogs, Ezine Articles, and other sites can make up for the strength that’s gone.
4. Duplicate content. I’ve had a few times where I’ve seen entire sites copied and put up on another domain by a black hatter. In other cases I’ve seen single articles being stolen. This isn’t usually a problem until the black hatter starts throwing tens of thousands of links at his version of the original site or article. In some situations, Google doesn’t handle this well. Usually the stronger site wins. If a black hatter is able to make a stronger version of your site or article because of black hat links, you may see a huge drop in your rankings. This is because Google now believes that your site is the spam site.
If you find yourself in this situation, there are a lot of things that you can do. First of all, you can contact the site who stole your content to let them know that you’re aware of their theft. You can also report them as spam to Google - you can do this inside your Google Webmaster Tools account. Make sure to tell them everything you know about what happened. Give them dates, if possible. That alone will usually take care of the problem because Google can easily figure out who put up the content first with a manual review. If it comes to it you can file a cease and desist order, and in some cases a civil law suit.
If you only have a single article that’s stolen from you, it doesn’t usually affect your entire site. It will only affect that single article. You may have bigger problems if your entire site gets ripped off.
If a spammer steals your content and links back to you, you usually won’t have any problem at all. Google uses links to determine the original source of content. You’ll run into more of an issue if their version of your article doesn’t link back to you.
5. Your site becomes stale. Over time your competition may attract more and more links. They may publish more and more content. If you fall behind them in these two areas, you’ll start to lose momentum with Google. Google counts not only the overall link strength of your site, but also the momentum you have for attracting new links. If you don’t attract any new links, you’ll start to slip (assuming your competition is attracting new links).
The obvious solution here is to create new content and attract new links. Usually when this happens to me on a site it only takes a few new links and a few new articles on the site. This of course will depend on how competitive your keyword is.   Questions/Comments? If you have any additional reasons that you’ve seen rankings drop, please help everyone by leaving them in the comments. Also let me know if you have any questions, or if you can back up what was said in this post