- Your competitors are not sleeping
This is a very common situation actually. You think that your site has lost its rank, while in fact it's your competitors' sites gained it. Usually, the amount of drop is not significant, few positions down or so, but depending on the intensity of your previous months work it may drop even more. Remember, SEO is not sprint, it is marathon. - Some of your inbound links were filtered out or devalued
This happens when you got many links and then Google devalued them. Your link strength has greatly decreased and your rankings have dropped. If you read the off page section carefully, you know that links don't have the same value. Some are more valued than others and the value of a link highly depends on the value of a linking website. So if the quality of that website falls down for some reason - so does the value of link to your site.
For instance, you may had many links from reciprocal partners and all went good, but the partner sites placed more and more links to the same page and finally your link has become simply one of the many, receiving only a small portion of the link juice - that's devalueing. The links also could be devalued by Google. If it founds that a link is irrelevant or bad quality, it reduces its initial value or filter it out completely.
Devalueing may result in significant loss of rankings at once, or in a slow yet constant loss of positions over time. Gathering high-PR links from relevant websites reduces the risk of such issue to the minimum. - New ranking algorithm introduced
Very similar to the above. Each ranking factor, either off-page or on-page has some value assigned to it somehwere inside Google's algos. If Google introduces some new algorithm or made some changes with the next update - all sites get evaluated according this new algo and their ranking is updated accordingly. Some of them could raise up during the update while others could fall down.
The key point here is that Google does not want to put somebody's sites down. It has no interest in it. The purpose of such update is to increase the quality of a search, so the best strategy to survive any Google algo update is to use high-quality links and whitehat methods of SEO. If you don't mess up with some doubtful SEO, if you have good neighbourhood, and if you obtain only high-quality links from relevant sources - you will not lose your positions, or even increase them thanks to those unlucky guys who didn't manage to read this tutorial carefully and therefore lost their rankings and freed some space in the SERPs for you. - On-site problems
We all make mistakes, so sometime the issue is not Google, but your own site. The most common case is when you buy a new domain name and transfer your website to it, but do not setup a redirect ftom the old one correctly. So the links are now pointing to non-existing pages and Google has no other choice but remove them from the index. The other common situation happens when your hosting provider changes some script execution rules and your dynamic pages suddenly stop working returning with 404 or 503 or any other server-side error. If your ranking are going down - check your website first. - Penalty
What is penalty? It is a kind of damping factor applied to your rankings. How does one know if his site is penalized? No way. Your site may be penalized right at this time and you don't know it. You should understand though that not every loss of rankings is a penalty! However, Google does penalize sites that use blackhat SEO techniques such as hidden links, keyword stuffing or having bad link neighbourhood or irrelevant links. There is no artificial penalties made for the only sake of dropping some sites down. Google is about search, and it worries about search, not about putting some site higher or lower in rankings. So if your site has received a penalty you should ask yourself, why Google thinks that my site is not relevant to that query? Is this something about my content? Is this those links I bought last month? There is always a reason. - Site is banned
What is ban? When your site gets excluded from the index of a search engine - that is ban. How does one know if his site is banned? Simply. Type site:mysite.com query in the Google search box, where mysite.com is the URL of your site. If you don't see any results then - congratulations, your site is either banned, or has never been crawled (true for brand new sites). Why would Google ban a site? Mostly, because that site violates Google Webmaster Guidelines or uses blackhat SEO methods. How can one bring the site back to Google index? Step one: remove all blackhat stuff from your website. Step two: submit your site to Google again.
Reading the above points you may have already noticed some similarity about them. There is a zero chance of having any problems with Google if you are a) using legitimate, whitehat SEO methods; b) working constantly on improving the site. Indeed, the source of all problems is low (well, may be not exactly low, but at least not high enough) quality of the website content. Fill your site with unique, informative, must-read content and you won't need to ask others to link to you - that linking strategy works best of all and does not experience any difficulties with Google updates.
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