Why did my Google rankings drop? 6 causes we diagnosed

The message usually turns up on a Monday. Rankings are down, enquiries have gone quiet, and can we look at the site this week. Attached is a screenshot of a graph going the wrong way.

The first thing we ask for isn't the screenshot. It's a date. Not "a few weeks ago", not "since about July". The day the line turned.

That sounds pedantic and it isn't. A ranking drop is one of maybe six things, and most of them announce themselves by when they happened rather than by how they look. Get the date and you've usually eliminated four of the six before anybody has opened a page of copy. Skip the date and you end up doing what most people do, which is rewriting the pages that were already fine.

Getting the date

Search Console, Performance report, compare mode. Set the date range wide, twelve months if you have it, and look at impressions rather than clicks. Clicks are noisy at small volumes and a single good week can hide a slide that started a month earlier.

What you want is the shape. Google's own guide to debugging drops in Search traffic opens with sketches of the graph shapes and what each tends to mean, which is more useful than it sounds. A cliff is a different animal from a slope. A cliff on a Tuesday is usually something you did. A slope over ten days is usually something Google did. A dip that comes back on its own is usually seasonality or a reporting glitch, and Google explicitly lists reporting glitches as a cause, with a shrug emoji in the documentation, which I appreciate more than I probably should.

Write the date down. Then go and check it against the calendar.

Was it an update?

Google publishes the start and end of every named ranking change on the Search Status Dashboard. This is the single most underused free thing in SEO. It takes about forty seconds.

The durations are the part people miss. The May 2026 core update started on 21 May and took eleven days and twenty-one hours to finish rolling out. The March 2026 one ran twelve days. The August 2026 spam update was quicker, under three days. So a "gradual decline over a fortnight" is not evidence that something slowly rotted on your site. It's the exact shape of a core update landing.

If your date sits inside one of those windows, you have your answer, and the answer is uncomfortable but freeing: Google's core updates page describes them as broad reassessments that don't target individual sites, and the debugging guide above says outright that there might not be anything fundamentally wrong with your content. Google's own analogy is a list of your twenty favourite restaurants, rewritten a few years on. Some places move down without having got worse.

Two rules from Google's core updates guidance are worth following exactly. Wait until the rollout has finished, then wait a full week more, before you judge anything. And compare the week after against the week before the update started, not against the middle of the rollout, or you're measuring half a change.

What are the six causes, and how does each look?

Match the shape and date of your drop to the table, then follow the check.

The first five are covered below. The sixth, the drop that is only in a report, is the one we see most on local business sites, so it has its own section.

Is the drop real, or is it in the report?

Check the clicks and the device split before you assume a ranking loss. On our client sites several drops turned out to be measurement.

A page average dragged down by searches from elsewhere. A pest control homepage showed 3,727 impressions at position 40.7 with 14 clicks, and looked like a collapse. Its 112 named searches split three ways:

Without the out-of-area group the page sat at 28.3. The business name was close to a place name elsewhere, and its region name matched Sydney suburbs on a railway line with the same name. Look up every unfamiliar suburb in your queries.

A rank tracker. On the same site, in-area named queries on desktop fell from 2,424 to 1,186 impressions between two 28 day periods (5 September to 2 October, then 3 October to 30 October), while mobile held at 127 and 129. Tracking tools add and remove bursts of automated searches overnight. When one device falls and the other does not, suspect the tool.

A page that is mostly a long tail. A property development guide showed 3,504 impressions at 36.7. The searches it was written to win sat at positions 15.7 to 22.7. The 36.7 came from about 95 definition style searches at positions 55 to 90. A second post at 60.0 was the real problem, because its best position was 49.2. Going by the average, we would have rewritten the healthy page.

A few junk rows. One of our own posts showed 92 impressions at position 20.0. Seventeen impressions came from scraper searches made of another site's feed address, at positions 7 to 11. The searches people typed were at 53.6 and 68.7.

A change to how Google reports. In September 2025 Google stopped returning 100 results per search, and averages moved. One site's year on year average went from 35 to 21 in a week with nothing changed. Do not compare positions across that date.

Google Business Profile clicks counted as organic. On an appliance repairer's site, Search Console listed clicks on http:// addresses that Google had never crawled. They were clicks on the Business Profile's website links, which pointed at the old http address. That series fell from 35 to 19 clicks over two 14 day periods while the https pages held. The drop was in profile traffic, not in organic ranking.

To read a page properly, open it in the Performance report, switch to Queries, keep the searches it is meant to win, and ignore URLs, odd strings and places you do not serve. The band between positions 11 and 30 is where work can realistically reach page one. Small numbers swing averages: a move from position 20 to 14 on 6 impressions is not a trend.

Small drop or big drop

This is the distinction that decides whether you do anything at all.

The debugging guide draws the line between a small move, their example is position 2 to position 4, and a large one, position 4 to position 29. Small moves happen constantly in both directions, and their advice is to leave it alone. They go as far as recommending against radical changes to a page that's already performing well, which is the exact opposite of what a panicked owner does on a Monday afternoon.

A large move is a different message. Something about how that page is assessed has changed materially. That's worth work. But it's worth work on that page and the queries it lost, not a site-wide rewrite.

Pull the query list for the affected page before and after. If twelve queries dropped four places each, that's noise. If two queries fell off a cliff and the rest are untouched, you have a specific problem with a specific intent, and now you know what to read.

The four causes that aren't Google

If the date doesn't line up with anything on the dashboard, it's almost certainly one of these.

You changed something. Rebuilds, redirect changes, a new template, a plugin someone installed, a noindex that shipped with the build. Check the date against your own deploys before you check anything else. If there was a redesign anywhere near it, the redirect map is the first place to look, and we've written about what goes wrong there in detail.

Something broke quietly. Server errors during crawls, a robots.txt edit, pages timing out under load, or a sitemap that stopped telling Google about edits. On one builder's site the sitemap dates froze at each post's publish date and 15 of 28 suburb pages were missing from it, and the blog fell from 1,212 impressions across 21 pages to 306 across 12. Plain http that does not redirect to https can also split a page in two: one of our posts was indexed at both addresses. The Pages report in Search Console will tell you, and it's the reason a technical audit starts with crawl health rather than keywords.

Seasonality. Boring, real, and the easiest to confirm: compare the same month last year rather than last month. Plenty of Australian service businesses have a July that looks like a catastrophe and is just July.

Someone else moved. A competitor published something better, or a big publisher decided your topic was worth covering. Nothing broke on your side at all. This one is genuinely common and there's no fix beyond doing the work.

Worth ruling out first, though: are the pages even indexed? If the drop is total rather than partial, you might be looking at an indexing problem rather than a ranking one, and those two get confused constantly. We've covered how to tell them apart.

What we've seen across our client sites

A new or retitled page often gets a short burst of impressions and then drops back, which is not a lost ranking. A builder's post sat at positions 7 to 13 for six days and then showed no impressions while staying indexed. A property post sat at 4 to 6 for a week after a new title. Look at the page's daily series before you call it a drop. And do not judge an edit for at least a month, because 25 of 97 pages we edited had not been re-crawled since the change.

What not to do in week one

Don't rewrite pages that dropped four places. Don't add three thousand words to a page because a tool said it was thin. Don't disavow links on a hunch. Don't buy anything from whoever emails you offering to fix it, and they will email you, because drops are visible from outside.

The reason is the comparison problem. If you change six things and the numbers recover, you learned nothing, and you'll do all six again next time out of superstition. Change one thing. Wait. Most recoveries after a core update take until the next one anyway, which is a genuinely awful thing to tell someone but it's the truth of it.

This week

Open Search Console, find the day the line turned, and write it in a note somewhere you'll find it again. Then open the Search Status Dashboard and see whether anything with a name overlaps it.

If it does, you have a date, an explanation, and a reason to leave your best pages alone for a month. If it doesn't, check your own deploy history for that week, and the answer is probably sitting in there.

Either way you're now working on the actual problem rather than the first one that came to mind, which is most of the job. If you'd rather hand that part over, a free website audit will tell you what's earning and what's broken before you spend anything on fixing the wrong thing.