Sudden big drop in ranking - update, tech issue or penalty?

[Varazad]

We are managing a website that was previously consistently ranking on P1 or top position on P2 and over the weekend (28th Jan) suddenly dropped to P5.

What is the best way of ascertaining whether this was down to an update, a tech issue or a penalty? There are other pages on the site (sub-folders) which are still continuing to rank well on the site for similar kws.

Regards,
V

[Varazad]

Thanks Greg & Marie,

The site in question was acquired a few months' ago a fairly old site on a WP engine and had a couple of tech issues at the start but they were fixed and seemingly all was back to normal.

I have since gone on and disavowed some poor backlinks and also fixed some 'Missing Author Missing Updated' issues that were popping up on GSC

No crawl errors and no Manual Actions showing up, hoping it is just a temporary blip.

[MarieHaynes]

I've found that there has been a lot of turbulence in the SERPS in the last few weeks. I've had two clients that dropped from page 1 for many terms to beyond page 6 and then a few days later jumped up to rank even higher than they were before.

Have you made any changes to the site in the last couple of weeks? Here are some things I'd be doing to assess a traffic drop:

-Check in GA to see if the drop is across all pages or just certain pages. If it's certain pages, is there a pattern?

-Is the drop across all devices? For example, if the drop is just in mobile, perhaps the site was affected by Google's changes to the mobile interstitial algo.

-Have there been changes to the robots.txt file?

-Is there anything in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions?

-Are there any crawl errors in GSC that could alert you to a problem?

-Do your pages fetch and render properly in GSC?

Another thing to consider is the age of the site. If this is a new site, it's not uncommon for the site to get a honeymoon boost and then drop down again.

If none of those apply, then what I'd recommend is to wait it out for a few more days and see what happens. You may find everything pops back up again.

[GPainter]

I would give it a bit more time to settle, its very easily to jump the gun. You can also check sites like serpmetrics and algoroo as well as webmaster world etc. for any news but Google is constantly trying different things that result in SERP moving about. I normally leave things for a week before i conclude that may be the final position.  I would also potentially check and changes you've done off-site or on site that may have affected the rank, not forgetting search engine console.

Hope this helps.