Cliff-edge Google ranking drop from #5-10 to #80 overnight. No AI content, no changes in backlinks, no GSC manual actions. Have I been penalised for something? If not, what else could be going on? Any help would be very much appreciated!

Leading with questions in the hope of getting them answered:

• Have I been penalised somehow without it showing up in GSC? How can I find this out? What can I do about it?
• What should I be focusing on first?
• Should I be removing my website link from unrelated personal projects?

---

The actual post:

Hello - I run a small service-based business and have been consistently ranking towards the bottom of page 1/top of page 2 of Google pretty much since I set up my website about 3 and a half years ago.

2 days ago, every single keyword I was ranking for plummeted to around #80 and I do not know why.

It is such a massive drop that it feels like I must have been penalised, but I have no manual actions in GSC and can't think what I could possibly have received a penalty for.

For context, I am a skills coach working mainly with employees with ADHD and autism and a significant amount of my clientele have some workplace funding, which means I have never really needed to even consider any kind of "hard sell" - my website has always prioritised giving a really clear sense of what I'm like and what I offer, and to give useful information on what my profession actually is and what the scope and standards are, which has served me well up to this point.

What I was ranking for before:

• Around rank 10 for fairly high-competition keywords like "adhd coach", which was actually where most of my clicks came from
• Around rank 5 for localised keywords like "adhd coach uk"
• Also around rank 5 for a few not-particularly-competitive keywords like "audhd coach" and "adhd career coach".

I realise this is not particularly stellar but it was more than enough for sustainable work, which was all I needed really.

I have now lost all of these completely and am only ranking for my full name.

My backlink profile is not particularly amazing:

• A few relevant directories, plus Yell etc
• Linked as my author link in some unrelated personal projects, some of which receive significant traffic (should I be removing these because they aren't relevant to my industry?)

These have remained stable, I haven't lost any backlinks over the last few days.

Other possibly relevant things:

• I don't blog very much - I started to write more blog posts a month or two ago and have been trying to focus on really nuanced, human-written content which addresses questions I occasionally see popping up in my GSC in detail.
• I handcoded my website and I don't think my blog is that easy to navigate - maybe that's worth addressing?
• My blog does make it clear that I am the author, I use citations for all posts, and the few posts I have written do (I think) cover content I've not seen anywhere else.
• My Pagespeed score is fine on desktop, not great for performance on mobile. I've been trying to improve this in various ways for years but it's not helped much.
• Taking the approach I've seen people mention of reverse-engineering high-ranking content...I'm not really sure where to go. Most of my high-ranking competitors are agencies rather than individuals (a number of them are psychiatrists diagnosing ADHD and offering coaching as post-diagnostic support, which is not quite my niche) and some of the smaller high-ranked pages have almost no content (one is essentially a "we have closed" banner!). So I don't know what to take from this. It also doesn't seem like they have brilliant backlinks profiles either.
• I have no AI-written content anywhere on my website.

I'm not really sure what I should be focusing on but am obviously very worried since this is my entire livelihood and after years of stability it has collapsed overnight.

I am interested in SEO and have a background in front-end development, but am not particularly knowledgeable about how the details apply to me and don't really know where to start.

submitted by /u/mrsaturncoffeetable
[link] [comments]

from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/UYISOWh