Let’s face it, in the real world, sometimes things break. Maintaining your SEO efforts is as important and the initial push that put them in place to begin with; this requires you sweep your site for changes for things which could negatively impact rankings.

10 Common SEO Blunders That Could Make Your Rankings Dip.

1. Your .htaccess file gets corrupted, changed or hacked.
2. The robots.txt is altered and blocks the bots from crawling or indexing content.
3. A plugin, add-on/module or CMS system is malfunctioning and breaking naming conventions or creates 404 errors (broken links).
4. There is an excessive amount of duplicate content such as meta tags, server side elements, footer links, etc) that toggle an algorithmic suppression from search engines.
5. Server load time could cause a time-out, thus blocking bots from reaching key pages (which support the link flow for other pages).
6. You made too many changes too quickly to pages in your website, which can disrupt the trust and infrastructure your website previously had.
7. You built and or acquired or built too many links too fast and set of an algorithmic filter in search engines for unnatural link velocity.
8. You added too many pages too quickly (such as dumping 500 new pages into a site overnight) when you should have added them gradually to increase spider activity.
9. You excessively linked from common areas of the site from every page with the same anchor and thus cannibalized your SEO efforts of distinguishing each page as a relevant and unique target page.
10. Your website could be suffering from over-optimization or from linking out to a bad neighborhood (untrusted site).

One of the more common things is that your competition turned up the heat for their own SEO efforts and you got too comfortable in complacency (and not defending your position).

Regardless of what happened, each of the ten variables above can be traced back to a systemic root or cause and effect relationship. With the right method, the proper diagnosis and some corrective measures, recovering from a dip in SERP (search engine result page) positioning is all part of the SEO process.

Remaining vigilant and diligent in SEO defense as well as skimming the components that constitute a solid position will keep your search engine optimization tactics polished and ready to deal with inconsistencies (whether deliberate or accidental) as they arise.

-Jeffrey

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