This is possibly one of the most common questions you will come across in any SEO forum. This is because as soon as people see a difference in the way their website ranks, they immediately assume something is wrong.

There are a number of reasons why a website can loose it’’s rankings, more often than not, it could just be an update to a data-center you are viewing.

In my own experience, I could be enjoying the top spot for one of my target key-phrases and the next time I look, I could have fallen a few positions. I have learned over time not to react to this, instead, I will wait a few days to see if the position naturally returns on it’’s own, and more often than not, it does.

Search engines update their information constantly, different data-centers are used around the world to collect and store information, which is then used to update the index of a search engine, this could mean you see slight fluctuations in ranking positions, but once things settle down again, more often than not, you will find the result returns back to it’’s initial position.

Now, as I said, there are a number of reason’’s why a website can loose it’’s position, but generally, it is down to natural fluctuations due to the index being updated. Other reasons could be that continuous SEO was not applied to your website, therefore, you loose rankings as your competitors are still optimising for improved positions in the major search engines, they are in effect doing better because of the continuous work they are applying to their site.

It could also be that you did something to your site which had an adverse affect on your rankings. If this is the case, the easy way to correct it is to revert back to the state of the site before you made the changes which affected your rankings.

On most occasions, people generally know the answer as to why rankings dropped when they have made changes to a site, yet they still ask? Go figure.

If you have made no changes to your site, you have not been involved in dodgy link farms and you have continued to apply SEO and link building to your site then it is likely that dropped rankings are due to an update and should correct itself after a few days