You have to laugh at this sort of thing.  Some very interesting choice of words on this one, hehe

Whilst doing a little searching I found and adwords ad on search that had a little eye catching symbol. I reckon that this would increase CTR.

What do you reckon?

Then I also came across this one

I noticed this today. Not sure if it is new. I have seen other instances of it. But not one like this.

Whenever anyone asks me to try and find out why their website has dropped in rankings I go through a quick mental checklist to see what may be occurring. This can save loads of time and faffing about as you can zero in on the problem efficiently.

Some of these checks can be simple to do but in a few cases if you do find that the problem is one of these you should probably seek professional advice to avoid making further problems.

In no particular order of ease or importance:

Have you checked your htaccess file?
If you don’t know if you have a htaccess file, as a rough guide you only get them on apache servers. To see what your website is running look at netcraft.

Next, log into the server and look for any unusual lines in the htaccess file. If you don’t feel confident doing this, get your web developer to check for you. What you should look for is a rule based around the most common user agents :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !googlebot|slurp|msnbot [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://othersite.com [R,L]

What this does is tell Googlebot and other search spiders that the page has moved to othersite.com so the othersite.com gets the benefits of the links, but the page still shows to the average user.

I have seen this tactic used, very sneaky, but very real.

Have you checked your robots.txt file?
As with the htaccess file the robots.txt file may or may not be present, but it can be used on all webhosts and tells the search engine spiders what they can and can’t index. Robots.txt information page.

I saw on instance where a server was hacked and the only change made was to add one disallow directive, that basically told Google NOT to index and entire folder. Now this was 1000’s of pages and they all started slipping out of the Google index.

We could not trace the hack when we found it, however it was sadly, rather beautiful.

Have you made any changes to what you do?
Have you recently changed your SEO or added some new links, or done something new. For example, I have seen instances where a website owner employed someone else to get them links, but they went mental and got them 1000’s of links, links which were far from clean, they were blog comment links. So if you have had some SEO work done, find out exactly what they did and if you are lucky you might be able to rectify what has been done.

Have you made any technical changes, like hosting upgrades or change of IP/DNS etc?
Since you last had ranking have you moved hosts, or changed IP or it could be as simple as the server being down. So ask your technical person if you don’t know yourself.

Of course there is the damn right weird, like when Godaddy blocked GoogleBot, but you can get to that when this list of checks is fruitless.

Have you redesigned the layout or internal linking structure?
Have you recently updated the site, either in terms of design or the whole navigation. What can happen is pages are lost by creating broken links or you may have shifted the weight of a page by altering the internal anchor text.

Have you got any redirects in place?
Redirects can cause problems. More often than not, check out my 6 simple tips to protect your website.

Do you have duplicate content issues?
Duplicate content on a website can cause a drop in rankings, by basically filtering out your website from the SERPs. To see if you may have duplicate content issues, then take sentence from a page that may have been affected and do as search on Google for that exact string. If your listing no longer appears you may have issues. It is possible for someone else to create duplicate content on your site.

Are you having server header issues?
Have you changed anything on a server level that may have altered the headers served from your pages. If you don’t know what server headers are, they are part of the http protocol. For example a 404 code is the server telling the visitor or Googlebot that the page does not exist. So mixing up these headers and serving the wrong ones can deeply impact what gets indexed. In one case I worked on the CMS adopted a method of making dynamic content appear static with mod_rewrite but even when the page was really there the response header was saying that is wasn’t. So the page never got indexed, or it could mean that is got dropped from the index after a change.

Did the ranking drop occur after a Google ranking update?
Have you checked the forums, is there a lot of chatter about sites losing rankings. If there is you may be onto to something. For the moment though ….do nothing… quickly changing what might be the problem may be the worst thing you can do if you are not sure exactly what the issue is. If you are not sure get professional help. Sometimes it can be as simply a blip or burp in the Google algorithm and well worth waiting for things to settle.

Have you completely disappeared from the SERPs or dropped 30 places or some other tangible drop?
There can be a whole host of reasons why a website has dropped in the rankings, but getting the correct diagnosis is not always easy. One to check for is the +30 penalty. Have you dropped exactly 30 places in the SERP’s? Maybe you have the +30 penalty/filter. You should be able to fix this by looking at your linking patterns and cleaning up some stuff you may have added lately.

To be honest the penalty issue is so vast it deserves a post of it’s own. Same old advice, get some pro help if you are not sure.

Are Google messing with something?
Maybe you are falling foul of something like geo-filtering, which in its simplest format is where Google filter you out of appearing in the co.uk search results, because your server is located in a different country. So check local variations of the Google search.

Well that is it for now. I hope you don’t have the need for these, but my guess is that at some point you may encounter one of these. The same advice goes with most things, if you are not sure get qualified professional advice.

Cheers

Rich