What strategies can I implement to improve my website's ranking on Google and regain the lost traffic, considering that it was consistently on the first page for my primary keywords for about five years, but recently dropped to the sixth page, despite having strong backlinks and a 30 rating on Ahrefs?
Google does not consider on Ahrefs DR or Moz DA when ranking a website, So ignore these data. No one can say exactly without check your website that why this is happening with your website. Are you getting any error or message in Google search console? If your ranking is going down after March or this year it means your site have some issue and can guesss after check your website. You can PM me to check.
The answer is on page one of the SERPs. What have you done to the site in the past 3 months? Have you made any changes/updates or added backlinks? You can PM me your url and I'll tell you what factors you need to improve.
One suggestion would be to add a few internal links, with appropriate keywords, from other pages in your website to the ones that have lost ranking. Sometimes a few well-thought-out internal links to a page can boost it up again. Also, Google has made it very clear that they love internal linking. It helps them achieve their desired goal of understanding the content of the pages being linked to.
Totally agree with you on the power of internal linking. I remember when I had a couple of pages drop in rankings on my own site. I was pretty bummed out, but then I started adding more internal links from my high-performing pages to the ones that were struggling. Used some relevant keywords, and voila! I saw a decent improvement in their rankings.
OP pm'd me his url. His site is in a non English language and had major issues. Was missing the H1, poor technical seo, spammy backlink profile, etc. Gave him a decent sized list to work on.
Google is an idiot, they deindex and remove good content randomly. They removed from the index my well-structured informative posts but kept indexed posts that were copypasted from me on other sites. They never remove from the index the same post, every time they remove another one, I index all removed posts and in a few weeks find other posts also deindexed. Besides of their new scrolling, most visitors never see the sites after the 3rd page. I asked many people and all reacted the same way as me - if previously I clicked on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc pages, now with jumping scrolling, I check only the first 10 results.
Actually no, they deindexed all the websites that deemed bad quality in their recent google serp update. Even some major websites got deindexed. If your website was relevant and had quality content it wouldn’t of gotten deindexed.
My website is fine and I have a lot of good content. And all of a sudden the deindexed posts are easily indexed when I add them through GSC. I have quickly written short posts and I also have very thoughtfully structured posts with original content. Anyway, I think I've found the problem. This may be a problem with the sitemap plugin and I'm trying to check it. I use the same sitemap plugin on all my sites and some of them use AdSense. Over the past 10 months, I have tried to get AdSense approval for several of my non-AdSense sites, but they haven't been accepted. 2 days ago I changed a sitemap plugin on one of the rejected sites and it got approved within a few hours. I think all my problems may be due to this plugin. I described my problem with indexation here: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/my-posts-get-de-indexed.2879190/
Google search has messed so many good quality sites lately, giving rank to sites which are duplicate or copy of the original. People usually improve their backlink profile, optimize on page content and clear any negative backlinks and wait. Getting back rank is tough but proper optimization can help, but takes time.k Good luck.
confirm the drop and analyze recent website changes or Google updates that might be culprits. Then, focus on a content and technical SEO refresh. Audit your content for relevance and quality, address technical issues in Search Console, and analyze your top competitors to see where you can improve.