A Ranking That Dropped Overnight

The order to check things

A sharp drop feels like something was done to you, so the first instinct is to look outward.

Most of the time the cause is something on your own site, and it is one of about six things.

Working through them takes half an hour and resolves the majority of cases.

Reaching for an algorithm first means never finding the page that stopped being indexed in February.

The six ordinary causes

• The page is no longer indexed.
• Somebody edited or moved it.
• The site was down or very slow.
• A redirect or a setting changed.
• A competitor published something better.
• The results page itself changed shape.

The second is the most common and the most embarrassing. Somebody rewrote the page in a way that removed what it was ranking for, and nobody connected the two events because they happened three weeks apart.

Start with the index

Since this is binary and takes a minute.

Search for the exact address of the page in your search console and see whether it is indexed.

If it is not, nothing else matters and the question becomes why, which the tool usually tells you: blocked, marked as not to be indexed, redirected, or judged a duplicate of another page.

That single check resolves a meaningful share of these cases outright.

It also catches the situation where a rebuild left the whole site blocked, which happens more often than anybody would like.

Do this before looking at anything else.

Then check what changed on the page

Which requires knowing what it used to say.

Look at the page's history: your own version control, backups, or an archive of the web.

Compare the title, the headings, and the opening paragraph against the current version.

A title changed during a redesign is a frequent cause, since the title is heavily weighted and is the thing designers most often tidy.

Also check whether the page lost content: a rebuild that dropped three sections has a page that answers less than it did.

Where you find a change, reverting the specific element is a cheap test.

A worked example

A business found their main service page had fallen from the first page to nowhere.

The page was indexed and loading normally.

Comparing it against an archived copy showed the title had been shortened during a redesign two months earlier, removing the two words the page ranked for, and a section answering the main question had been cut for length.

They restored the title and the section.

It recovered over about six weeks, not immediately, which is the normal pattern and the reason people abandon correct fixes.

No algorithm had been involved at any point.

Confirm the drop is real

Before doing anything, since a good proportion of these are not.

Your own search results are affected by your location, your history, and your account, so checking by searching is unreliable.

Use average position in your search console, which is measured across everybody.

Look at a fortnight rather than a day, since daily figures move considerably on small numbers.

And check whether it fell for everything or for one query, since a single query moving is a different problem from a page falling generally.

Establishing that there is a drop is the step most often skipped.

It is also worth checking whether the query itself has become less popular, since a seasonal term falling in April is demand moving rather than your page losing anything.

Check the site as a whole

Since a page problem and a site problem need different responses.

Look at whether other pages moved at the same time.

One page falling points at that page: its content, its links, or a competitor.

Everything falling together points at the site: a technical fault, a manual action, or an update.

Check for a manual action notice in your search console, which is rare, unambiguous, and the one case where you are being told directly.

Look at who is above you now

Which is the answer when nothing on your side changed.

Open the results and read what is ranking where you were.

Frequently it is a page published recently that answers the question more completely, which is a straightforward and fixable situation.

Sometimes it is the same competitors in a different order, which suggests a broad reassessment rather than anything specific.

And sometimes your position is unchanged and the page now has a large block above it, which is the shape-change case and needs a different response entirely.

Do not change everything at once

The mistake that turns a recoverable drop into an unexplainable one.

A sharp fall produces urgency, and urgency produces a week of simultaneous changes: the title, the content, the internal links, a new plugin, a rebuilt page.

If it then recovers, you have learned nothing about which change mattered, and if it falls further you have no way back.

Make one change, note the date, and wait, since these take weeks to register regardless of how quickly you act.

Keep a copy of the page as it was before you started, which is the thing everybody wishes they had a month later.

The counter-case

Sometimes it genuinely is an update.

Where the drop is sharp, sitewide, coincides with published update dates, and nothing on your side changed, that is the explanation.

The response is still to improve the pages rather than to look for a setting, but knowing the cause prevents a fruitless hunt.

And occasionally something is genuinely broken at the search engine's end and recovers on its own.

Confirm the drop, check the index, compare against an archived copy, and read what is above you now.

The half hour

1. Confirm it in search console, not by searching.
2. Check the page is indexed.
3. Compare against an old copy.
4. Check the title specifically.
5. Ask whether other pages moved too.
6. Look for a manual action.
7. Read what ranks above you now.

Step three finds more of these than anything else, since the most common cause is a change somebody made to the page weeks earlier and nobody connected to the drop.

Why somebody else is ahead of you is covered in why a competitor outranks you.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.