James Dooley: So today I'm join with Kazad Dash. Today's video is about what to check if your website has dropped drastically in Google rankings. So people are obviously asking, um, why has my site dropped in Google and why is my website dropped off the face of the earth on Google? So it's not even gone, it's on page one now, it's not even in the top five pages. What would you start to to look at if a site has dropped drastically?

Kazad Dash: So if it's not even in the top five pages, I would, I would first of all check if there's a manual action, um, because that that's typically a good place to start. See if there's any errors in your um Google Search Console. Usually it will be in in like a red box saying like, "Hey, you might have a manual action." It might be to do with links or it might be a spam um manual action and Google might have essentially just removed your entire website off of Google um, potentially they might have thought that you're doing anything dodgy when it comes to your link building or potentially they might just think that you're spamming their um their search engine as well. So they've just removed your website.

James Dooley: Yep, yeah. On that, with regards to some of the Google Search Console penalties that you get through unnatural inbound links penalty is very, very common. So, with regards to that, obviously you need to be submitting a disavow file and trying to remove your most toxic links out of your back link profile. The amount of times that even sites that don't have this unnatural links penalty though can still be sat in a partial penalty. The amount of websites I'm looking at after we've done a disavow have jumped back up massively. Some of them don't haven't even dropped drastically in Google. They might have only dropped to page two and they they wondering why we've gone and ran the disavow and removed the most toxic bad links, got the toxicity for below what it needs to be in correlation to the competition and then sitewide team jumps back up. So I think they're sat on an unnatural link penalty. But even when you've not got an unnatural link penalty, doing a proactive disavow and removing your most toxic back links is important. But talk to us about like technical SEO. If someone potentially could have technical SEO issues, you can look in like Google Search Console or Screaming Frog. Like, is it important for people to make certain the site speed there's no errors? Like, what's your thoughts on from a technical standpoint?

Kazad Dash: So typically speaking, and I'm I'm going to go with like a a 60% um score here. If if you've got like a slow website but used to rank and now it doesn't, it's probably not because you've got a slow website. There's probably something an underlying issue there. My go-to two tools for this is either Site Bulb or Screaming Frog. Go and purchase them, run an audit on your website and what you would be looking for is orphan pages, um, P links to pages that no longer exist. So you might be linking to like, let's say, 404 pages or potentially you might be doing double 301s. So you might have changed the URL and you're still linking or internally linking to that old URL. So look to fix all of these issues, um, obviously if you can optimize your images, making certain that they aren't just DSLR uploaded images, then that that's great as well. Because at the all at the end of the day um you might have also dropped in rankings because you are wasting Google's crawl budget. So whenever Google comes to your website, for example, you might have bad content which we will go into later on in the video. You might have bloated images, for example, or you might just be internally linking to wrong pages.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think my thoughts with as the technical SEO. Bear in mind, I am not a great technical SEO, but the my thought process to the team is you wouldn't build a house on quicksand. So if you're building out a website, just make certain you're ticking all the boxes and all the foundations to make certain it's as fast as it can be. Don't procrastinate and obsess over site speed though, but there should be no 404 errors on your website. That's just been, I I think a good rule of thumb for this is try to do a technical SEO audit every 90 days. That that's what I recommend, because in some cases you might have team members that might just upload the wrong image or potentially they might build the wrong internal link to an orphan page or whatever the case may be. So just real quick, do buy Screaming Frog or Site Bulb, do an audit every 90 days and you should be good. Yeah, but no 404s and then silo structure is probably the biggest part for me for technical SEO. No orphan pages, make certain everything's a minimum of three clicks away from the homepage. If you can get it two clicks away, even better.

Kazad Dash: Yeah, so site structure. One caveat to what you've just said is if you are a bigger e-commerce store, you might want to be four clicks.

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, so just again, it depends what type of website you are. If you're a local business, just make certain that if if you've got let's say five service pages, five location pages and let's say 20 different blog articles, everything at that point should probably be about two. I would probably agree with you. If you are an e-commerce store, let's say, and you have got 5,000 products, you're probably going to want to use categories, subcategories and at that point you probably are looking at three, maybe four clicks away from the home page. Yeah, so the next part, if someone has a website that's dropped drastically in Google, is content pruning. Now, everybody in the industry is obsessed at present with topical authority. Seems to be the buzz word. So and it goes, again, and now I'm going completely against this and I'm saying delete pages. So why would I say delete pages if they've been dropped drastically in Google search? Why why am I giving that advice?

Kazad Dash: So basically, for for anybody that has never done a content pruning um audit before, what you're looking at is a 12-month period of the last 12 months and what you're trying to find out are pages that have never had any clicks or impressions on your website. So let's say if you have a 100-page website and let's say 25 of those pages never had any clicks, never had any impressions, it's a good indicator that Google didn't like those pages to begin with. Yeah, so you should probably either do content expansion on those uh pages or get rid of those pages and 301 them or potentially 410 them depending on if they had backlinks or potentially if if they were um powered up by any links and stuff. You might want to 301 those to another page, but in some cases you might want to 410 those pages, which basically means a 301 is the next time Google crawls that page it gets redirected to another page. A 410 means that that page no longer exists, so Google will stop visiting that URL.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think the big part with content pruning is too many SEOs have become obsessed with topical authority and they've scaled the website out too wide to what their core focus is. So sometimes you need to sit back, look at the website, see what your central entity of your website is and what your source context of your overall domain is. And if you've got pages that are too far away from your central entity and what your what your website is generally about and those pages are not ranking, therefore they are not adding to your topical authority, because topical authority is only when you do topical coverage that gets traffic right? Otherwise, it's pointless having it on your site. You're wasting internal page rank distribution and you are wasting Google's crawl budget. So I would be looking to delete those pages if it's wider than your overall main central entity. But the caveat to that is if you've got pages that get no impressions or no clicks but you feel it's an important topic for your overarching domain and website, that's when you're not looking to delete it. You're looking to do what you mentioned, which is content expansion or content optimization. Go into that page and see why is it not ranking? Those pages probably need to be completely rewritten if you not had any impressions for it, then it's in a dire state right? Because even if we've had a lot of pages rewritten, even when they had five, 10,000 in impressions but been getting no clicks because we've missed the intent of what the page should be about. So if they're getting no impressions, it definitely deserves a rewrite. There's something not quite right about that page. Google doesn't like it at all. But if it's getting impressions and not getting the clicks, then at that point could do with, is it too short? Is it only 500 words when everyone else has written 3,000 words? Can you add more entities to the page? Can you get more internal links through to that page? Can you get some external links pointing through to that page from decent kind of fat links and stuff like that? There could be many reasons of why it's not getting the clicks. But if it's not getting the impressions, it completely needs a rewrite.

Kazad Dash: So on content optimization, ex like let us know a little bit more with what you mean with content expansion. So content expansion, um, if say for example there is an LSI or a secondary keyword that that page is shown impressions for and you don't have it on the page, you should probably be adding that onto the page, cuz that might be the difference from ranking let's say position 10 to position four, yeah, um, so again you're kind of just like rejigging the content to to try and optimize for a list of LSIs or secondary keywords. So that's one method I like to use, um, I also like to check the intent. In some cases, what you mentioned, you might have completely missed the actual intent of that page. You might have written let's say a 5,000-word monster guide but in reality you might just need some more images through to that page or you might actually need to remove some content and actually turn it into like let's say a 1,000-word guide. Um, so there's there's definitely certain things you could do with that, and then another thing as well is internal links as well. So in some cases, I see it a lot where people, they've uploaded an article through to their website and it could be a very important article um to do with their industry, but they've just not built any internal links. And building internal links to articles, it's a good way of showing Google, "Hey, this page here is very important. You should be crawling this page as much as you possibly can." So that's what I would be looking at doing, um, adding in missing keywords, looking at the intent and building more internal links.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think um expand on that slightly as well is that once you know the main focus keyword for a page and what it's ranking for, he's going searching that in Google, checking to see what other terms show up in the auto-suggest is quite a good one and going, "Oh yeah, that's still relevant to that page. I've got those terms on the page." Checking the people also ask is there any questions in there that you've not, you've not added that as being a H2 or H3 in the content and then specifically answered it? The related searches at the bottom of the page, is there any in there that you're going, "Actually, I'm not touched upon this?" Google is saying that Google, giving you that information that people also ask this question and is of related searches, related to this topic. So by adding those in, there's um a tool also called SE testing.com, Y, and what that does is um you can load in your Google Search Console data and it'll start showing you what words or phrases or questions are in your content that you're getting impressions for or even getting clicks for that's not even been mentioned once on the page. So sometimes you can go in and add them in, and then straight away, you can, might, it might only be jumps from position number four to position number two, that could double or treble the amount of traffic that page is getting. When it starts getting more clicks overall, it starts getting a better quality score, and then it, for the primary terms, could end up jumping to number one, for the primary terms, but that's so that's content optimization. What about building new links? Obviously, it's easier saying you need to go and delete links, but actually what might have happened is they might have been building up the link velocity, so it's on an upward trajectory and then slowed down or stopped building links. Or they could have had link loss. So it's also important to keep the link velocity going for each SEO. So many people I see come and they do an initial boost, start flat lighting and almost stop, and then the sites get hit and then they're wondering why they've been hit. Well, the upward trajectory curve was like that, so Google was presuming that you're going to consistently keep building that way. The minute you start stopping, the curve changes and now it start saying, "Yeah, maybe it's not going to be as powerful as what we thought in six months and 12 months time." Therefore, those temporary jumps of what you had in rankings now have been removed and you might just need to be building new again.

Kazad Dash: Yeah, link building. Is it kind of reminds me of PPC in a way? Like, as soon as you stop doing it, or as soon as you have some links that just disappear, because naturally some links just disappear, um, you it can have drastic changes to your rankings. One thing that I would say is if you have dropped in rankings, go and do an audit on the last let's say 60 or 90 days and you can do this on Ahrefs and look at the links that you've actually lost and see why you've lost them. Potentially do outreach to those websites and say, "Hey, why is my link um being removed or what's happening?" and try and get those links reclaimed back, because that's another very quick win. Um, if if you have got a lot of links that you have lost, um, definitely do that. And then when it comes to building new links, you've said this before, um, where what you should be looking at as well is are the links indexed? If they aren't, go and index those pages. You can use um Index Optional, Giga Indexer. There's a lot of indexing tools that you can use, but go and use those tools to basically just export your entire backlink profile and run it through one of the indexing tools, and that's another quick win that you can do. Um, tiered link building. So a lot of people focus on building new links and they don't actually focus on powering up their existing backlink profile. So what I would recommend to that is again go into Ahrefs, um, go to the backlink section. You can sort by referring domain, highest to lowest. So you're looking at your the backlinks that are pointing through to your website, but you're looking at the referring domains pointing at those websites. And if, say for example, you've got some really good links, let's say they they're DR80 links, potentially you might have done a digital PR campaign and you've got a link from Forbes, but that Forbes URL doesn't have any links pointing through it. Go and power that link up with some tier twos. I highly recommend Search Through for that. And then let's take a look at some link building as well. So what I would then be looking to do is acquiring new. If, say for example, you were on a positive link trajectory, you're probably going to want to maintain that positive link trajectory. So again, doing digital PR helps, doing guest posting helps, making certain that you're doing um homepage links as well. So links to your homepage with like branded, because again, that helps with the E-A-T side of stuff as well.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I think the indexing of existing backlink profile is key. Getting Google bots and bringing bots to come back to your backlink profile, cuz especially if you've been buying niche edit link inserts, the page might be indexed but they might not picked up your link, or if your link is further down the page and Google might not crawled that whole page loading. Sometimes those guest posts into an indexer might then pick up the link when it was never counted in the first place. So Ahrefs or Majestic or Link Research Tools or whatever third-party tools that you're using, SEM Rush, they might have picked it up, but Google might not yet have crawled that link and seen that link. So getting that into an indexing tool is key. And then, like you said, ping up the amount of people that obsess over this is just bizarre. Links are placed on web pages and on URLs, not on domains. The amount of people that obsess over DR as a metric and how powerful the domain is, yet there's no internal links through to the guest post, so it's an orphan page. The page-level power is shocking, and they don't do tier links. They'll go and spend £400 on a guest post on a relevant do-follow link, but the page has got no power, and there won't anyone spend $90 to go and get three tier-two backlinks to power that page up? It just seems bizarre. Just one thing to add to the actual link build inside of stuff. You should almost see your backlinks as an asset to your main primary website. So, for example, if, say for example, somebody got a link from James D dot com, right, and you link to my website, that page, let's say, is talking about the best iPhone cases and it's linking to my iPhone case website. That page at one point might have been indexed but might have fallen out of the out of the de out of the index. So again, just by looking at, don't focus on what's happened with your website but also focus on what's happening on on other people's websites that's linking to your website as well. That's super important and I feel like nobody really talks about that as well. Everybody's just focused, "Oh my God, my my website's tanked. What should I be doing with my website?" No, no, no. Just look at your your links as well, cuz in some cases it might be your links that's causing the issue.

Kazad Dash: Yeah, another part is traffic diversity, yeah? So can you be getting traffic from Pinterest, from Facebook groups, from Twitter, from YouTube, from building up an email list and all these other different ways? Cuz traffic is key. Getting traffic through to your website, not just from where you're ranking in Google. Having that diversification of traffic, Reddit is ranking better than ever. Can you not go into Reddit and start looking at all the main pages that's ranking for the topic and keywords that you want to rank for and add some value? But then say, "For more information on this," and link it through to a relevant page on your site? And that, TW, that, um, Reddit referral traffic is brilliant for your SEO. Quora, for questions and answers. Can you go into that and any pages that are ranking that's relevant to your topic, go and add some value for the users and then put a link back to your site? That referral traffic, again, is key. Can you get that traffic diversity? That's another huge part. Make the the website that you have like a real business. Can you start to build up an email list? Can you each week or each month send out a newsletter or an email out which drives people back to your site? Those return visitors and those behavioral signals is huge. So that's another big part. That if you have been, are you getting any sort of behavioral signals away from just ranking in Google? Can you try to improve that traffic diversity that's coming through to your website?

James Dooley: Yeah, definitely. Like, for example, on on my YouTube channel, I always say, "Make sure to check out KazadDash dot gov daily now, to KazadDash," from my YouTube, because I don't do any link building. I don't try and rank the website or anything. Is is I think it gets about 150 searches a month, just for just for the actual brand name. So if you can be building out social profiles with actual good content, it does go a long way. So, for example, I see a lot with lawyers doing it with um with uh YouTube. Chiropractors, I don't know if you've seen that with like TikTok? They've got like the the videos where they're just like cracking the patients back. All of that is just another form of SEO and it just drives a lot of branded search and referral traffic through to their website. Then the last one for us to touch on, so again, if you've had one of your websites had a massive drop in SEO rankings or in traffic, is E-A-T. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. In the SEO industry, it's kind of divided. Some say it's a myth, some say it's important. My thought process is, even whether it is a myth or not a myth, is you should just be doing it anyway. Even if it's not a direct ranking factor, which I actually think that it is, but even if it's not, a real business has all the cookie policy, the privacy policy. A real business also has different ways that you can contact them, a telephone number, an email address, a contact page. A real business has an about page, who they are and a meet the team page with what staff are employed and stuff like that. This is, these are all things that real businesses have, right? So if you are just an affiliate site, be more like a real business because you're going to get more trust signals from Google. If you are a real business and you have won some awards and you do have some people that are very experienced, showcase that on your website. Take what you have offline and put that online, that brand. It's brand reputation management. You need to be shouting and screaming about any awards that you've won. That is just like out there. You should be doing that. That is just part of E-A-T. But it's not even, I mean, it's a branding that beats E-A-T. It's just general marketing. Go and get yourself to look like you are the best company for the product and service that you sell.

Kazad Dash: I think I think just another thing to add to what you've just said is you you've just kind of focused more so on on on-page E-A-T, but there's also off-page E-A-T, where you're getting your business name mentioned. Um, for example, IBM, they have a lot of unlinked mentions, so links that doesn't even link back to them, but it just mentions the company. Um, now, again, I'm not saying go acquire 10 million backlinks like IBM unless you've got the budget, but you want to try and replicate what some of the big guys are doing, because again, IBM, like, they very rarely go down in traffic. If anything, they they are consistently going. They might have a few dips here and there, but on the grand scheme of things, if you look at it over a 10-year period from 10 years ago until now, it's it's grown big time. Um, so unlinked mentions definitely help. Mentioning your actual business um owner. For example, a lot of lawyers do this, where um an actual lawyer within the law firm might um go and win an award or they might go and win a case for a high um for a high celebrity status person. They'll go and scream, they'll go and scream and shout about that on their website, but they'll also go and do it on other websites and it links back to their website. So anything like that, um, awards, like what you've just mentioned, naturally you should be doing, like a PR campaign, saying, "Hey, I've just won this award," um, and then again, like a lot of offers do this. So, offers will go and get listed on sites like Mukra. Um, they might go and release a book, for example, and then again on Amazon, that book page would link back to your website. So you've got a variety of different ways. One thing I will say is E-A-T isn't just clear cut. It's not just, "Do these five things and it works." So, for example, if you're a local business and you're you're um your website's traffic's dropped, what you might need to worry a little bit more on is actually getting reviews on your Google Business Profile, cuz that's E-A-T, um, you might want to focus more so on testimonials because that, again, is E-A-T, whereas if you are, let's say, an e-commerce platform, you might want to focus more so on websites like Trustpilot, making certain that you're listed on there, Reviews.io, making certain you're listed on there, um, making certain that when people search your e-commerce platform, so let's say it's James Dooley, James Dooley space review, that that's a positive experience, cuz because again that helps with people purchasing your product and again when Google quality raters search for certain keywords like that, they'll see, "All right, okay, it's a genuine business, or listed on Trustpilot, listed on Reviews.io," but if you are, let's say, an affiliate site, the E-A-T would look completely different to a local business. So just bear that in mind when we are talking about E-A-T. It's not just a one-size-fits-all.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. So if you've had a website that's dropped drastically in Google, leave a comment in the comment section, put "SEO ranking drop" and what we can do is, at present, we are doing quite a lot of audits completely for free, where we are going checking these sites that have been hit. Right, so at present, with regards to the helpful content update, I've not known anybody yet recover properly from the helpful content update. So the HCU, um, there's a lot of people that have been hit from it, but there's been seven or eight others in the last 12 months, with regards to updates. And conclusively, we can say what's needed to be to recover for those sites, whether it is a disavow, whether it's content pruning, um, there's a lot, obviously, there's lots of different stuff that we've just discussed now, but leave a comment saying "SEO ranking drop" and then if you want us to do a completely free audit, we can have a look through and see what we feel could be the reason of why your website has dropped drastically in Bing or in Google search.

Kazad Dash: Anything to add? No, that's it.