Your website on Google has lost its ranking overnight? When considering a business strategy, here’s what Indian businesses should check first.
On Monday morning, when you go to Google Search Console, the graph looks like a ski slope. Customers aren’t as active, the ring tone is less loud, and your long-awaited keyword has dropped down from the top to page 3.
Don’t panic, do not rebuild the site, do not rush to hire somebody who says they can “fix SEO” right now. Before you panic, rebuild the site or hire somebody to “fix SEO” in a hurry, go through the checks below in order. The majority of overnight drops can be attributed to a few causes – the first couple can be diagnosed in less than an hour.
Make sure the drop is actual and not a fake.
The rankings change each day and a slight drop doesn’t indicate that anything is wrong.
- Check Google Search Console (GSC) → Performance → last 7 days vs previous 7 days, last 28 days vs previous 28 days. Consider clicks, impressions and average position.
- Rule out seasonality. Diwali, wedding season, board exams, IPL, monsoon, financial year end (March) are some of the days that bring a lot of traffic to many Indian businesses. Compare to same time last year, NOT last week.
- Check by country and device. A decline in India or only on mobile does not necessarily indicate a global decline.
Don’t use rank checkers exclusively – ranks are location specific and personalised. The position 4 of the tool may not correspond to the position 4 that a customer in Pune or Lucknow sees.
A rule of thumb: 1-3 positions is normal noise. A drop of 10 or more stations in several pages is a serious issue.
Look for a manual action (or security problem):
This is the quickest test and the most severe one.
Navigate to Google Search Console, and choose Security & Manual Actions.
When a human user at Google decides to take some action against it for spammy links, thin content, or cloaking, it is a manual action. In the event of an existing one, GSC will tell you what to correct, and will allow you to resubmit a reconsideration request.
Security issues – your site can be hacked, and is common to pirated plugins and themes on older WordPress sites. Signs include:
- Any articles in Hindi, Japanese or pharma related terms that show up in your Google search results are weird pages.
- Redirects to unknown sites on mobile
- To prevent this, a “This site may be hacked” label appears in search results.
If you find either, repair it, first. Until this is fixed you will not be able to do anything else.
The Next step is to see if there’s a Google Algorithm update.
Google has many updates to its ranking systems throughout the year. A few are “core updates” that realign the results in numerous industries, and some are small.
- Visit the Google Search Status Dashboard (status.search.google.com) to see any core updates or spam updates that have been announced.
- Check the date of your drop against the announced date of any update. If they line up, it is a likely due to an algorithm change.
- Check SEO news sites and forums for other people being hit at the same time as you are.
Please note: If you dropped due to an update, in most cases it does not imply that you were “penalised”. It implies that Google determined that other pages better answer the query. The solution will generally not be a quick one, and there will be no reconsideration request to be filed. The solution is to enhance the content quality, expertise and trust over time, and recovery may only be achieved in the next update.
Did you accidentally create technical issues?
A lot of the “mysterious” decreases are after a change by someone on your side. Request your developer, agency or hosting company to explain just what has changed in the past couple of days.
Common culprits
This is the most frequent issue and happens when the page is accidentally noindexed or when robots.txt blocks it.
Sometimes it is left behind after a redesign or staging-to-live migration, with a noindex tag or with a line in the robots.txt that says Disallow: /. Check the URL Inspection tool on important pages of GSC for confirmation of indexability, and visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
2. Incorrect site migration or site redesign.
Switching themes, platforms (WordPress to Shopify for instance), or domains can cause rankings to be lost.The rankings could be lost when switching the theme, platform (WordPress to Shopify for example), or the domain. Any old URLs that are now 404 will lose all their authority.
3. Modified Web site URL(s), title(s), or website content.
Pages that ranked previously can fall in ranking if their page titles, headings or body content are rewritten, particularly if a different keyword is used.
There are no canonical errors in this report.In this report, there are no errors of the type HTTPS.
Ranking signals may split or become confused when the sites are using mixed HTTP/HTTPS versions, or when canonical tags point to the wrong URL.
Downtime or slow servers.
Look at the GSC → Settings → Crawl stats. When there are many more server errors (5xx) or many fewer crawl requests, it means that Google failed to reach your site with any consistency. If you have one of those budget shared-hosting plans which can’t handle traffic surges, this is something you may want to check out.
If you do not have a Technical SEO checklist, then you can refer to our Technical SEO checklist. It will guide with all the necessary points.
Optimize mobile experience and Core Web Vitals.
Most Indian users are surfing from average and average 4G phones. Slow images, bloated plugins, and slow scripts are detrimental to rankings and conversions. Test a number of pages with PageSpeed Insights, and review the Core Web Vitals report on GSC.
Review indexing and coverage
In GSC, press the PAGES (Indexing) button.
- Are indexed pages going down all of a sudden?
- Has there been an increase in “Crawled – currently not indexed”, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, “Soft 404” or “Server error (5xx)”?
- Have you been able to maintain indexing of your most critical pages? Use the URL Inspection to test them.
If the important pages are missing from the index, chances are you have hit your target. If you have a lot of URLs that aren’t adding much value to your page and they are filter pages, tag archives, or parameter URLs, then Google may perceive that your site isn’t as valuable as you think.
Audit your backlinks
One of the most powerful ranking signals that Google has is links.
- Are you missing any important connections? You may have had a link removed from a news site or directory or even changed by the news site or directory. Use a backlink tool or check this in Search Console’s Links report.
- Is there a suspicious link structure? Low-quality links, like irrelevant foreign sites, casino or sex, or blatant link farms, can sometimes be a symptom of negative search engine optimization, although Google states that it ignores most spam links.
- Did you purchase links or be a part of a link exchange scheme? Links from paid websites and PBN websites are unsafe. Google’s systems to eliminate spam have improved dramatically and sites that use them may experience drastic decreases.
If you have previously been buying low quality SEO packages (“500 backlinks for ₹3,000”), then this is a probable suspect!
We would recommend you not to buy these cheap links, as they harm your website in a lot of ways,an example of it can be spam. These cheap backlinks can increase your website’s spam score. Instead, you can hire an agency or SEO freelancers like us for white hat seo services.
Be honest about your content.
Any other technical or penalty reason is a probable sign of content or relevance. Ask yourself:
- Does content actually provide value, or is it merely for SEO? Pages that are full of keywords or copied from rival sites or created with AI without human intervention will not be rewarded in the long run.
- Is it truly experienced and knowledgeable? Photos, business case studies, named authors with credentials, local examples and clear business details create trust.
- Is it up to date? A page with outdated prices, expired offers, old GST rules or old statistics is not as useful as fresh content from other pages of competitors.
- Is it relevant to searchers’ expectations? When someone searches for the best CA in Bangalore, and you have a sales pitch page, other pages may be preferred by Google. Observe the format, depth and angle of the current top ranked.
- Have competitors improved? At other times you didn’t get worse. Someone else got better. Look at the pages that outranked you and do a search for your main keywords.
Review Local SEO (most important for small businesses in India)
Rather than just website ranking, much of your visibility as a clinic, restaurant, coaching institute, retailer or service provider is due to the Google Business Profile (GBP) and local Google map pack.
Check:
- Is your profile verified and still active? Suspensions occur, and are sometimes the result of unauthorized editing.
- Has your business name, category, address or phone number changed? A common cause of suspension is keyword stuffing in the business name (e.g. “Best Cheap AC Repair Delhi NCR 24×7”).
- Have there been any new fake or competitive reviews? Or had you lost some of the sincere reviews?
- Has your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) been consistent throughout your website, local listings and social profiles?
- Have you addressed any reviews and updated photos and hours? Inactive profiles are eroded over time by active ones.
Eliminate tracking/reporting problems
Occasionally the traffic was not down. The measurement did.
- Did Google Analytics tag end up being removed in a site update?
- Do most visitors have their consent banners blocking analytics?
- Have you migrated to GA4 from Universal Analytics and are you comparing apples and oranges?
Compare GA4 with data from search console. When there are no changes in GSC but no sessions in GA4, the problem is not rankings, but tracking.
Try this short checklist
Solve these problems:
☐ Validate the decrease in Search Console (seasonality taken into account)
☐ Check Manual Actions and Security Issues
☐ If any Google updates have been announced, compare the drop date with them.If Google announced updates, compare drop date with announced updates.
☐ Inspect robots.txt, noindex and canonical tags
☐ Check out any recent site changes: redesign, migration, plugin updates, or content changes
☐ Server errors and checking indexing status
☐ Review backlinks: lost or suspicious.
☐ Review content to ensure it is of high quality, as it is now above your pages
☐ Analyze the health of Google Business Profile (for local businesses)
☐ Ensure your Analytics tracking is working properly.
Next steps – what to do, what not to do
Do:
- If there are technical issues that are clearly incorrect, that has to be corrected right away and then re-indexed in GSC of important pages.
- Record all dates, changes, before and after metrics.
- Wait and see post-fixes. Recovery may take days to weeks and sometimes even until the next core update.
- Continue to develop content that is informed, insightful, and user-friendly.
Don’t:
- Control dozens of pages of a panic edit.Handle dozens of pages of a panic edit at once. There will be no one to tell you what worked or didn’t.
- Purchase fast payday back link packages.
- Because of a one-week dip, rewrite your whole website.
- Believe any promise that promises “page 1 in 30 days”.
- Get rid of links you have no idea about. Fewer times is it really needed and can have a negative effect if not used carefully.
Determine when to seek assistance from a professional.
If you don’t have a technical SEO, hire one to help with:
- The domain has been manually taken down or hacked.
- You have suffered a traffic reduction following a migration and are not sure why?
- This decrease is significant (50% or greater) and sustained (weeks or longer)
- Organic leads are vital for your business and you are lacking the in-house expertise.
Ask an agency to provide a diagnostic audit in the first place, and see what they come up with, not a general report. Beware of anyone who does not do the diagnosis and directly proceeds to selling a package.
The bottom line
It’s a disaster if you suddenly find you’ve dropped in your ranking, but typically there’s a reason. First the quick, quick checks (penalties, security, indexing, changes on your site in the last few weeks); then the slow, deep checks (content quality, links, competition). Be analytical, systematic and don’t take shortcuts.
The companies that remain strong on Google are the ones that happen not to pursue all of the algorithm changes. They create a speedy and reliable website, publish true value content, and acquire genuine reputation – both online and off.