Google updated its guide with five changes on how to debug ranking drops. The new version contains over 400 more words that address small and large ranking drops. There’s room to argue about some of the changes, but overall the revised version is a step up from the one it replaced.
Change no. 1: Minimize traffic drop fix
The opening sentence was changed so that it offers less hope for recovering from an algorithmic traffic drop. Google also merged two sentences into one sentence in the revised version of the documentation.
The documentation previously stated that most traffic drops are reversible and that identifying the reasons for a drop is not straightforward. The part of most of them can be reversed was completely removed.
Here are the two original sentences:
“A drop in organic search traffic can happen for a number of reasons, most of which can be reversed. It may not be easy to understand exactly what happened to your site”
Now no hope is offered that “most of them can be reversed” and more emphasis is placed on understanding what happened is not simple.
This is the new guide
“A drop in organic search traffic can happen for a number of reasons, and it may not be easy to understand exactly what has happened to your site.”
Change #2 for security issues or spam
Google has updated the traffic graph illustrations to more accurately align with the causes of each type of traffic decline.
The previous version of the chart was labeled:
“Site-level technical issue (manual action, strong algorithmic changes)”
The problem with the previous label is that manual actions and strong algorithmic changes are not technical problems, and the new version fixes this problem.
The updated version now reads:
“Big drop from an algorithmic update, sitewide security issue, or spam”
Change #3 Technical issues
There is one more change to a chart label, also to make it more accurate.
This is how the previous chart was labeled:
“Page-level technical issue (algorithmic changes, market disruption)”
The updated chart is now labeled:
“Technical problem with your site, interests changing”
Now the chart and label are more specific as a change across the site and the “changing interests” are more general and cover a wider range of changes than the market break. Shifting interests include market disruption (where a new product makes a new product obsolete or less desirable), but also includes products that go out of style or fall out of fashion.
Change #4 Google adds new guidance for algorithmic changes
The biggest change by far is their new algorithmic changes section which replaces two smaller sections, one on policy violations and manual actions and a second on algorithm changes.
The old version of this section was 108 words long. The updated version contains 443 words.
One section that is particularly helpful is where the guide breaks algorithm update damage into two categories.
Two new categories:
Small drop in position? For example, drop from position 2 to 4. Big drop in position? For example, dropping from position 4 to 29.
The two new categories are perfect and align with what I’ve seen in search results for sites that have lost rankings. The reasons for dropping in and out of the top ten are different than the reasons why a site drops out of the top ten entirely.
I disagree with the guide for large drops. They recommend checking your site for big drops, which is good advice for some sites that have lost rankings. But in other cases there is nothing wrong with the site and this is where less experienced SEOs are often unable to fix the problems because there is nothing wrong with the site. Recommendations to improve the EEAT, add author bios, or disallow the link don’t fix what’s going on because there’s nothing wrong with the site. The problem is something else in some of the cases.
Here’s the new guide to debugging search position drops:
“Algorithmic update
Google is always improving the way it evaluates content and updates its search ranking and serving algorithms accordingly; Core updates and other smaller updates may change the performance of some pages in Google Search results. We post about notable improvements to our systems on our Ranking Updates list page; check it out to see if there is anything that is applicable to your site.
If you suspect that a drop in traffic is due to an algorithm update, it’s important to understand that there may not be anything fundamentally wrong with your content. To determine if you need to make a change, review your top pages in Search Console and evaluate how they ranked:
Small drop in position? For example, dropping from position 2 to 4.
Big drop in position? For example, dropping from position 4 to 29.
Note that positions are not static or fixed in place. Google search results are dynamic in nature because the open web itself is constantly changing with new and updated content. This constant change can lead to organic search traffic gains and losses.
Small drop in position
A small position drop is when there is a small change in position in the top results (for example, dropping from position 2 to 4 for a search query). In Search Console, you may see a noticeable drop in traffic without a big change in impressions.
Small position fluctuations can occur at any time (including moving up again, without you having to do anything). In fact, we recommend that you avoid making radical changes if your page is already working well.
Big drop in position
A big drop in position is when you see a noticeable decrease in the top results for a wide range of terms (for example, dropping from the top 10 results to position 29).
In cases like this, self-assess your entire website as a whole (not just individual pages) to make sure it’s useful, reliable, and people-centric. If you’ve made changes to your site, it may take some time to see an effect: some changes may take effect within a few days, while others may take several months. For example, it can take months before our systems determine that a site is producing long-term useful content. In general, you’ll likely want to wait a few weeks to reanalyze your site in Search Console to see if your efforts have had a beneficial effect on your ranking position.
Note that there is no guarantee that changes you make to your website will have a noticeable impact on search results. If there is more deserving content, it will continue to rank well with our systems.”
Change #5 Trivial changes
The rest of the changes are relatively trivial but nevertheless make the documentation more accurate.
For example, one of the headings was changed from this:
You recently moved your site
To this new title:
Movements and migrations of places
Updated Google ranking documentation
Google’s updated documentation is well thought out, but I think the recommendations for big algorithmic drops are useful for some cases and not useful for others. I have 25 years of SEO experience and have experienced every Google algorithm update. There are certain updates where the problem is not resolved by trying to fix things and Google’s guidance used to be that sometimes there is nothing to fix. The documentation is better, but in my opinion it can be improved even more.
Read the new documentation here:
Debugging falls on Google Search traffic
Review the above documentation:
Internet Archive Wayback Machine: Debugging drops in Google Search traffic
Featured image by Shutterstock/Tomacco
