After the recent Google updates to rid the SERPs of sites carrying tons of spammy backlinks a few services providers are popping up promising to clean up a site’s profile backlink. While this is all well and good cleaning up your backlink profile does not guarantee that you will return to the place in the SERPs that you once held.
It will be costly to clean up tons of links and before you decide to go this route you need to first understand that there are a number of reasons, besides backlinks, that your site may have tanked.
Below are the top five factors that could have contributed to a change in your site’s rankings.
1. Your Competitors Built Some High Quality Backlinks That Put Them Ahead of Your Site
The unexpected appearance of your competitor’s site above your own in the search engine results does not suggest foul play. They most likely would have gone out and built some high quality backlinks which put them ahead of you. The solution to this is quite simple. Go out and beat them at their own game by building some backlinks yourself. Attract links from high quality sites by writing some controversial but interesting content so that others link back to you.
2. Google Made Updates in Algorithm Signals
This is nothing new. Google is constantly changing the metrics that it uses to score pages, links and texts. This means that what may have put you ahead last week may not be so significant this week and so another site that scored higher for another reason might be ahead of you. The changes in the metrics is not an indication that you did anything wrong.
3. Some of the Sites Linking To You Shut Down
It’s nothing new. Sites shut down every day even trusted ones. If a high page rank site carrying your backlink suddenly shuts down or removes your link then you cannot receive the same credit that you once had. When quality links are no longer valid your rankings will be affected. Build new high page rank links to get your site back to where it once was.
4. Another Site Used Shady Backlink Techniques To Outrank You
The converse to the first factor mentioned above is that your competitor may have used shady link building techniques to boost their rankings in the SERPs. This can be quite upsetting to discover when you investigate the backlink profile but tactics like these don’t go rewarded for very long so don’t make a big deal about it. Eventually Google will find out and take action.
5. You Spammed The Web To Get Backlinks
Of course we cannot ignore the fact that a lot of webmasters followed back advice and published backlinks to their sites anywhere and everywhere. Those spammy links have resulted in a lot of sites being penalized. If you were a victim you can either go through the time consuming process of cleaning up your backlinks or start from scratch once again.
These are just five reasons that your site’s rank could have been affected. You will need to carefully investigate to determine what caused the change and work out a solution to get back to the business of making money online.