Pages Disappearing from Search

[simonukss]

Hi,

We have had a strongly ranking site since 2004. Over the past couple of days, our Google traffic has dropped by around 20% and some of our strong pages are completely disappearing from the rankings. They are still indexed, but having ranked number 1 are nowhere to be found. A number of pages still remain intact, but it seems they are increasingly disappearing.

Where should we start to try and find out what is happening?

Thanks

[Alick300]

Hi,

First Check Google search console for any message from Google about any issue. If there are no message please check for which keywords ranking goes down or disappear ranking. Check anchor text for all the URL whose ranking Goes down.

over optimization of anchor text could also be reason if no message in Google search console. I'm just speculating because these could be the reason.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[CleverPhD]

I would also check Search Console to see if Google is reporting a lot of 404s. Maybe your site has been down some.  Also check your robots.txt and also your site for any noindex or rouge canonical links.

The basic approach here is to look first at any technical items.  Is your web server or code is acting in such a way that Google cannot crawl your site or giving a signal that your pages are faulty or giving a directive to deindex them.  You do this as it is the simplest thing to check and the easiest thing to fix.  Did you have a major site change, etc.

After that, you check your rankings data and your organic traffic data to look for any patterns.  Is this to the whole site, is it to specific pages.  This may give clues of what is going on.  Did it only change from Google and not from another source.

You then look at external factors.  Did you lose good links?  Did you gain bad links?  Did a competitor or two come in and outrank you?  Do these traffic changes correspond with a known Google update?

Good luck!