On-Page Factors
If your rankings drop, check that this file isn’t accidentally blocking Google’s crawlers.
What is the robots.txt file?
Losing these from authoritative websites can lead to a drop in rankings.
What are backlinks?
Using too many of these can slow down your page load time, affecting rankings.
What are large images or scripts?
Ranking drops can occur if your content no longer matches this—what searchers are looking for.
What is search intent?
This file tells search engines which pages to crawl and index on your site.
What is the robots.txt file?
Duplicate these can confuse search engines, causing a rankings drop for affected pages.
What are meta titles and descriptions?
A sudden spike in low-quality backlinks might cause this Google action, leading to a rankings drop.
What is a manual penalty?
This technical issue might happen if your HTTPS certificate expires, causing a rankings drop.
What is an SSL/TLS error?
These types of pages may drop in rankings if they’re considered thin, meaning they don’t offer value.
What are low-quality or thin content pages?
This tool from Google helps you see which of your pages are indexed and detect crawling issues.
What is Google Search Console?
An incorrect implementation of this tag can cause canonicalization issues, leading to rankings drops.
What is the canonical tag?
This type of harmful linking scheme can lead to a Penguin penalty and lower your site’s visibility.
What is link farming?
Your site speed can be tested and improved based on this specific set of metrics from Google.
What are Core Web Vitals?
This Google process ranks pages with well-researched, authoritative content higher.
What is E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)?
You might see this in Search Console if Google is having trouble reaching your pages.
What is a crawl error?
Forgetting to update internal links after a URL change can lead to this issue.
What are broken links?
If you disavow these, it can help recover rankings lost due to a bad backlink profile.
What are toxic backlinks?
A drop in mobile rankings could result from this error, meaning your site isn’t rendering well on mobile devices.
What is poor mobile responsiveness?
This type of Google algorithm update can include changes that devalue your content if it has become outdated or irrelevant.
What is Helpful Content?
A drop in rankings can occur if too many of these non-essential URLs are being crawled.
What are low-quality or duplicate pages?
This on-page element can cause ranking drops if it’s missing, duplicated, or not optimized for SEO.
What is an H1 heading tag?
Having backlinks from too many sites with this “black hat” technique can negatively affect your rankings.
What is keyword-stuffed anchor text?
Missing this code element can cause schema to appear on the front-end of your website.
JSON-LD script closing tag (</script>)
Using too many of these in your content can lead to keyword stuffing, which may result in a rankings drop.
What are keywords?
This type of error occurs when a page is blocked from Google’s index due to a conflicting directive.
What is a “noindex” tag issue?