If your website sees a big ranking drop, it’s most likely caused by a Google algorithm update. If you change your website, it can take weeks to months until you see changes in the search results.
That’s what Google’s John Mueller said in a webmaster hangout on YouTube.
It takes time to process website changes
Here’s what John Mueller said:
“If you have a bigger website then it takes quite a bit of time for the algorithms to adjust to to bigger changes on the website. So that’s something where I wouldn’t expect to see fast changes.
It’s more a matter of […] several months over which it takes for us to recrawl, re-index, reprocess the website to understand how it has changed, how we need to change how we show it in the search results.
So if you made changes on one day and like a week later you start seeing changes in the search results, that was also a date that other people mentioned as kind of bigger changes that they were seeing, then probably that’s not related to the changes that you made.
Usually you’d really have like this multi-month period of things kind of subtly changing over time rather than like this one big change.”
If you see ranking changes on your website, they are not from recent changes on your website. The changes can be influenced by previous changes on your site.
You should stay on top of things
Even though you cannot see immediate results, John Mueller also says that you should stay on top of things:
“I’m always conscious about this saying like you should just leave it for a couple of months because that sounds like oh I’m never gonna change anything again until it figures out where it wants to show my website.
And you always need to be on top of things anyway. So there’s always a certain amount of things that you’ll be working on anyway. So I shy away from saying I’m not going to touch anything until […] June or July.”
You can view the video here:
How to stay on top of things
The tools in SEOprofiler help you to stay on top of things. The Top 10 Optimizer helps you to optimize the contents of your web pages and the website audit tool helps you to remove technical errors from your pages. Both tools help you to improve your rankings. You can create your SEOprofiler account here:
