SEO Strategy · 7 min read
Rankings drop for specific, diagnosable reasons. Most of them are fixable. But “wait for the algorithm to settle” is not one of the fixes.
You open Google Search Console on a Monday morning and something is wrong. Traffic is down. Rankings that were stable for months have shifted. Pages that were on page one are now on page two or three.
Your agency says: “There was a Google algorithm update. We are monitoring the situation. Rankings often recover in four to six weeks.”
Sometimes that is true. Often it is not. Here is how to actually diagnose what happened.
Step one: Establish what actually dropped.
Before assuming it is an algorithm update, check the basics in Google Search Console.
Go to Search Results. Set the date range to the last three months. Compare to the previous three months. Look at which specific pages lost clicks and which keywords lost position. Is it sitewide? Is it one section? Is it one page? Is it mobile only?
The answer to those questions determines everything that comes next. A sitewide drop has a different cause than a single-page drop. A mobile-only drop has a different cause than a desktop drop.
The most common reasons rankings drop.
1. A technical change broke something
This is the most common cause of sudden, sitewide ranking drops — and it has nothing to do with Google. A WordPress update, a plugin conflict, a theme change, a new developer editing something they should not have. Check:
- Is your robots.txt blocking Google from crawling your site? (Go to yourdomain.co.za/robots.txt and check)
- Did any pages accidentally get set to “noindex”? (Check your SEO plugin settings on affected pages)
- Did your site speed drop significantly? (Run a PageSpeed Insights test and compare to your baseline)
- Are there new crawl errors in the GSC Coverage report?
Cross-reference with your WordPress update log. If you updated something around the time the drop happened, that is your likely culprit.
2. A competitor improved significantly
Your rankings did not drop. Your competitors rose. These look identical in your GSC data but have completely different solutions.
Go to Semrush or Ahrefs and look at the top three competitors for your key terms. Did any of them publish new content, earn significant new backlinks, or rebuild their site in the last three months? If a competitor launched a comprehensive new page on a topic you had thin coverage for, Google may have reassessed who deserves the top position.
The fix here is improving your own content depth and authority — not waiting.
3. Your content no longer matches search intent
Google regularly reassesses what type of content best serves a particular search. A page that ranked well two years ago for “wheelchair prices South Africa” might now be competing with a new type of result Google considers more useful — a comparison page, a directory, a product listing format.
Search the keyword and look at what is currently ranking. Does your page match the format, depth, and intent of the top three results? If not, that is the gap to close.
4. A Google core update
Google runs several major core updates per year. These reassess content quality, expertise, and trustworthiness across the entire web. They can cause significant ranking shifts — but they almost always reward genuine depth and penalise thin or templated content.
Check the Google Search ranking updates page to see if an update coincided with your drop. If it did, the recovery path is improving the quality, depth, and authority of affected pages — not waiting six weeks and hoping.
5. You lost backlinks
If a site that was linking to you removed the link, went offline, or was deindexed, you lost link equity. This is more likely to affect domain-level rankings than individual page rankings. Check your backlink profile in GSC (Links report) or Semrush for any sudden drops in referring domains.
6. Your site was penalised
Manual penalties from Google are rare but real. They show up in GSC under Security and Manual Actions. If you see a manual action notice, this is serious — it means a Google reviewer found something that violates their guidelines. Common causes: spammy backlinks (from previous link building campaigns), thin or duplicate content, cloaking.
If you have ever used a link building service, check your backlink profile carefully.
What “wait for the algorithm to settle” actually means.
Sometimes it is genuinely the right advice. After a core update, rankings can fluctuate for two to three weeks before stabilising. If your site has strong fundamentals, temporary volatility often self-corrects.
But “wait for the algorithm to settle” is also the most convenient response an agency can give because it requires them to do nothing for another month. It is unfalsifiable for four to six weeks. And it prevents you from asking harder questions about what specifically caused the drop and what specifically they are doing about it.
The right response to a ranking drop is a diagnosis within 48 hours. Not a reassurance. A diagnosis.
What changed? When? On which pages? For which keywords? And what are we doing about it this week?
The recovery playbook.
Once you have identified the cause, the fix is usually one of four things:
Fix the technical issue
If something broke, fix it immediately and request re-indexing in GSC. Technical fixes often show ranking recovery within two to four weeks.
Improve the affected content
Audit the pages that dropped. Are they thin? Are they outdated? Do they match the current search intent for their target keyword? Update them, deepen them, and resubmit for indexing.
Build internal links to affected pages
Pages that drop often do so partly because they lack internal authority. Link to them from your strongest pages. This passes equity and signals to Google that you consider them important.
Address the backlink profile if needed
If the drop followed a Penguin-style update and you have known spammy backlinks, a disavow file may be necessary. This requires careful analysis — disavowing the wrong links can make things worse.
When to get a second opinion.
If your rankings dropped more than 30% in a short period, if the drop is sitewide, if your agency has been saying “we are monitoring the situation” for more than three weeks, or if you have had unexplained ranking problems for several months — it is worth an independent audit.
Not because your agency is necessarily wrong. But because a fresh set of eyes on the data, with no stake in the previous work, will tell you things a current agency may be reluctant to say.
A nogravy Site Audit is designed exactly for this situation. We look at what is actually happening in your GSC and Semrush data, identify the most likely cause of any ranking drop, and give you a prioritised list of what to fix. Plain language. No agenda.