What are the most common causes of a ranking drop?
In the order we find them: something changed on the website, Google released an update, a technical fault appeared, a competitor overtook you, or Google applied a manual action. The first is by far the most common. A redesign that changed every page address, a developer who left a noindex tag on the live site, a new theme that halved the page speed, six service pages folded into one. Google updates come second and they arrive in waves, so if your rankings moved the same week as everyone else’s, that is your answer.
Manual actions are the rarest and the easiest to confirm, because Google tells you in Search Console.
- A change to the site: redesign, migration, new plugin, deleted pages
- A Google core or spam update landing that week
- A technical fault: server errors, a blocked folder, a hacked page
- A competitor building better pages or gathering more reviews
- A manual action, reported under Security and Manual Actions
How do I find out exactly when the drop started?
Open Search Console, choose Performance, set the date range to the last six months and look at the clicks and impressions lines. A drop from a site change is a cliff on one day. A drop from a Google update is a slide over a week or two. A drop from a technical fault often shows as impressions collapsing while the average position line goes blank, because the pages stopped being served at all.
Write the date down, then ask what happened to the site in the ten days before it. Most businesses know once they are asked. The site went live, the hosting moved, somebody installed a security plugin, a page was tidied away.
How do I check for a technical fault?
Three places, all in Search Console. Pages, under Indexing, lists every address Google could not index and the reason, and a sudden jump in the not indexed count with a recent date is a fault. Security and Manual Actions tells you outright if the site has been hacked or penalised. And URL inspection on a page that used to rank shows whether Google can still fetch it, whether it is being redirected somewhere odd and whether it now carries a noindex.
Outside Search Console, load the old page address. If it returns a 404, the redesign lost it, and every link and every bit of history pointing at that address is now pointing at nothing.
How do I know if it was a Google update?
Google publishes the dates of its core and spam updates, and the search industry reports each one within a day, so a search for the month and the word update will tell you whether one landed. If your drop lines up with an update, the question changes from what broke to what Google now prefers on that search. Open the pages that replaced you and look at what they have: more direct answers, real photographs, reviews, an author with a name, a clearer page for that exact service. Updates tend to reward the site that helps the searcher most, and they tend to hit the site that was ranking on thin pages.
What if a competitor has simply overtaken us?
Then nothing broke, and the recovery is a build job. Check their Business Profile for recent reviews, their site for new service and location pages, and whether they have been mentioned anywhere new. A Huddersfield firm that adds a page for every service it offers and gathers a review a week will pass a rival that has not touched its site since 2019, and from the rival’s side it will look exactly like a drop.
What would Halizona do about a drop?
Find the date, match it to the cause and fix the cause. That is the whole method, and it usually takes an afternoon to reach a firm answer. Redirects are rebuilt where a redesign lost them, stray noindex tags come off, hacked pages are cleaned and resubmitted, and the pages an update demoted get rewritten to do the job better.
Bond Brickwork has had search work running since 2018, through every update Google has released in that time, and it sits at the top of Google for the commercial brickwork searches that matter to it. Keeping a position through updates is mostly a matter of building pages that deserve it.
