Why your Google ranking dropped, and how to find out

Traffic falls, and the immediate temptation is to start changing things: rewrite the page, add keywords, buy some links, call an agency. All of that is expensive, and none of it helps if you have not established what actually happened.

The causes fall into a small number of buckets, and they are distinguishable. Work through these in order, because the cheap checks rule out the expensive explanations.

0. First, confirm it actually dropped

More diagnoses go wrong here than anywhere else.

Are you looking at rankings or traffic? They are not the same. Traffic can fall while rankings hold — a competitor’s ad now sits above you, or Google added an AI summary to that result, or the query itself is being searched less.

Are you checking while logged in? Your own browser personalises results, and you have clicked your own site more than anyone alive. Check in a private window, or better, use Search Console’s Performance report, which is what Google actually recorded rather than what your browser shows you.

Is it seasonal? Compare against the same period last year, not last month. A wedding photographer’s traffic falling in Muharram is not an SEO problem.

How much, and since when? Search Console gives you a date. A cliff on one day means something broke or an update landed. A slow slide over months is a different problem with different causes. Knowing which one you have eliminates half the list below immediately.

1. Something on the site broke

Check this before anything else, because it is common, it is free to check, and it is the only cause where every hour matters.

• Is the page still indexed? Search Console’s URL Inspection tool tells you directly. If Google cannot index it, nothing else on this list is relevant.
• Did a noindex tag ship? This is the classic. A staging site is built with noindex on every page to keep it out of search, then goes live with the tag still attached. Sometimes it is a checkbox in the CMS that someone ticked. Whole sites vanish this way and the site looks perfectly fine to a visitor.
• Did robots.txt change? A single Disallow: / line does the same thing.
• Did URLs change without redirects? A redesign that moves /services/web-design to /web-design without a 301 throws away everything the old URL had earned. Every old URL needs to point at its new home.
• Is the site actually up? Repeated downtime or errors when Google crawls will drop you. Check the Crawl Stats report.

2. A Google update landed

Google changes its ranking systems constantly and announces the large ones. If your drop starts on a specific date, the first question is whether that date lines up with a confirmed update — Google publishes a list, and the SEO press covers them within hours.

Two things worth knowing if it was an update.

A broad core update is not a penalty. Nothing is wrong with your site in the sense of a rule being broken. Google has changed what it rewards, and other pages are now being judged more useful for those queries. There is no switch to flip back.

Recovery is slow and comes from real improvement. Google’s own guidance on core updates is essentially “make the page genuinely better for the person searching”, which is unsatisfying and also true. Sites that recover usually do so at the next core update, not next week. Anyone selling you a fast recovery from a core update is selling you something.

3. You lost links

Rankings rest partly on who links to you. If a site that linked to you was redesigned, went offline, or simply removed the page, that support disappears — and it disappears silently.

This is the most common cause of a slow decline with no other explanation. It is also the most common cause of a drop after a redesign, where the redesign is your own: if the linked-to URL moved without a redirect, the link now points at a 404 and passes nothing.

4. The competition improved

The least dramatic explanation and frequently the correct one. Your page did not get worse; someone else’s got better. Somebody published something more thorough, or an established competitor finally noticed the query.

The check is simple and unpopular: open the results and read the pages now above you. Not their word counts — read them. Usually it is obvious within a few minutes whether they cover something you do not, answer more directly, or were updated this year while yours says 2023.

5. The result page itself changed

Sometimes you have not moved at all and the page around you has. An AI summary at the top, a product carousel, four ads instead of two, a “People also ask” block pushed above the first result — each of these takes clicks from position one without changing position one.

Search Console distinguishes this cleanly: impressions steady, clicks down, average position unchanged. That is a layout change, not a ranking change, and the response is different — a title and description that earn the click, or targeting queries that have not been absorbed by a summary box.

6. A manual action

Rare, but check because it takes ten seconds. Search Console has a Manual Actions report. If there is nothing there, a human at Google has not penalised you and you can stop worrying about it.

If there is something there, it is usually about bought links or thin content, it names the problem, and it requires fixing the cause and submitting a reconsideration request. This is the one case where the fix is defined rather than a matter of judgement.

The order to actually work through it

1. Confirm the drop is real — Search Console, not your own browser, and compare like with like.
2. Get the date. A cliff and a slide are different problems.
3. Check indexing, noindex, robots.txt and redirects. Free, fast, and the only genuinely urgent cause.
4. Check Manual Actions. Ten seconds.
5. Check whether the date matches a known update.
6. Compare impressions against clicks to separate a layout change from a ranking change.
7. Read the pages now above you.

Only then start changing things — and change one thing at a time, because a page rewritten, retitled, relinked and restructured in a single week teaches you nothing about which of those mattered.

What not to do

Do not rewrite everything at once. You lose the ability to learn anything, and if it was a core update you may be undoing what was working.

Do not buy links. This is the one action on the list that can turn a ranking drop into a manual action.

Do not panic over a week. Rankings move. A page that sits between position 4 and 8 depending on the day has not dropped; it is doing what pages do.

Do not assume it is technical without checking. And do not assume it is not. That is the whole point of doing the free checks first.

---

If you have been through the list and still cannot tell which of these it is, send us the site and what you have found so far. Half of what we do in an SEO engagement is this diagnosis, and knowing what you have already ruled out makes it considerably faster.