The hard part of having a website is getting traffic and achieving a position at the top of search engines. Once you have achieved this and gained a high page rank due to strong linking, good on-site SEO and website structure then its plain sailing, isn’t it? Well, that’s not always the case. There have been cases where websites have dropped in ranking and disappeared from the top of search engines. I will outline four reasons why this might happen so that you can avoid making these mistakes.

1.    Changing content on established pages. If you remove content on established pages that contain keywords that have been recognized by search engines this might affect your page rank and standing in search engines.

2.    You change the URLs throughout the site. When you change URLs throughout your website your are running the risks of having links to your site coming up as 404 Not Founds. You can prevent this by re-directing your old URLs to the new ones you have created. Only change URLs when it is essential to your website.

3.    You used black hat SEO techniques in the past. Using black hat SEO techniques are a big NO NO. Using doorway pages, hidden text, cloaking scripts or extreme keyword stuffing can land you in a heap of trouble. Your website can literally disappear overnight from search engines. It’s simple folks; stick to honest SEO techniques.

4.    Your server is poor and underperforming. If you use a server that has problems or has a slow uptime this can affect your organic search results. When a search engine bot tries to crawl your website and your server uptime is not good there is a chance that your site, or pages in your site, will be unreachable. We recommend using a hosting provider called Blacknight. They have consistent, trouble free server services.