Hi everyone,
Recently we've been seeing our rankings gradually drop (monitoring using SEMrush) - 1-5 spots most commonly, with some pages dropping 80 ranks!
Our website is about 2 months old now after having merging 6 websites into one new one, each of which previously ranked mainly in the 1-10 spots organically for their keywords, which translated to the same rankings when our new website went live. Only within the last 2-4 weeks have our rankings been gradually dropping, with limited increases and we're unsure why.
Firstly, I always tend to follow the usual best practice SEO management of our on-page content which allowed us to rank consistently in the 1-10 for the previous 6 separate websites, so it would surprise me if I've suddenly done something wrong in the last 4 weeks of SEO maintenance.
An issue I flagged with our website developer, which I thought was going to be a solution, was when he created the website, the h1 was being auto-labelled as the page title of the parent page, which immediately raised alarms in my head and made me think this was the cause: confusing the crawlers and missing out on a vital piece of SEO. After alerting our webdev and him changing the h1 to be more SEO appropriate, our rankings have still continued to drop across the board.
What we currently don't have in place are self-referencing canonicals across the board (we have them where it's appropriate - duplicates, external sites, etc), but I doubt that's the reason? We always carefully monitor our top competitors for any major growths in their organic rankability, and they aren't 'creeping' up on us really.
My question is: are there any reasonable explanations for a gradual decline in SEO rankings across an entire website? Each of our subdirectories are experiencing the same decrease in rankings, so perhaps there are site-based penalties in place? Ahhhhh!
A bit of a ramble, but any insight would be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks so much.
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/cyig98/gradually_dropping_ranks_what_gives/>
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