Possibility 1: Your website has been penalized by Google

To check if your website has been penalized by Google, search for "site:yourdomain.com" (replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name) on Google.

If Google does not display any pages of your website, then your site has been penalized.

Google only penalizes websites that use spammy search engine optimization methods. For that reason, you have to remove all issues that might have caused the problem:

1. Remove all on-page spam:

• Remove hidden or nearly-hidden text on your web pages. Reconsider any use of display:none and visibility:hidden that you use in the CSS code of your website.
  
  
• Check your web page titles, the meta tags and even the HTML comments on your web pages and remove any elements that might be interpreted as a keyword stuffing attempt.
  
  
• Remove any unnecessary redirects, links to dubious websites and all duplicate pages from your website.
  
  
• If you use cloaking or bot blocking scripts on your server, disable these scripts. Many bot blocking scripts keep legitimate search engine spiders away.
  
  
• Make sure that your HTML code is clean and that your web pages look nice. Don't use any automatically created doorway pages.

2. Fix all off-site issues:

Off-site issues are often the reason for ranking penalties and they are more difficult to fix than on-page issues.

• If you participated in automated link exchange systems or if you paid a cheap overseas link building service to get links to your website then it's likely that these links have been flagged as spam links by Google.
  
  Google does not like automated link systems at all. Remove all automated link systems from your website and try to make sure that these linking systems do not link anymore to your site.
  
  
• If you purchased links to improve your rankings, try to get rid of these links. Paid links do work to some extend but they can get your website in trouble when Google finds out that you use paid links.

3. File a reinclusion request

When you are sure that all spam elements have been removed, you can file a reinclusion request.

Keep your reinclusion request short and to the point. Be friendly and explain what you have done to clean up your website.

Possibility 2: This is a change in the ranking algorithm

A ranking drop does not necessarily mean that your website has been penalized.

1. You redesigned your website or your website is relatively new

Google also temporarily downranks websites after a major design change (source). In that case, you don't have to worry about the ranking drop because Google will give you your old rankings back after some time.

Of course, you must make sure that your new website design can still be parsed by Google and that your new web pages still contain the keywords for which you want to be ranked.

2. Other websites are better than yours

Search engine optimization is not a set-and-forget thing. Your competitors might have improved their websites so that they now have better content and better links than your site.

No website can keep its rankings forever. Re-analyze your web pages and optimize the content of your pages so that it is compliant to Google's latest ranking algorithm.

Also improve the backlinks that point to your website. The link builder in IBP can help you to get better links.

Losing rankings on Google is hard for any website. If you do the things described above, chances are that you will get your rankings back as quickly as possible.

If your website doesn't have top 10 rankings on Google yet, optimize it with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer. The optimizer will tell you what to do so that you get first page rankings on Google for the keywords of your choice.


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