If you are noticing your search engine results placing is dropping you have to act swiftly. Every place you drop will greatly decrease your return on investment. So if you were in the number 1 spot and you drop to number 2, you probably will see a huge drop in productivity of your site.

It may be that the other site has stepped up its Search Engine Optimization game or you are suffering from the effects of bad SEO. With Google and other search engines getting more sophisticated in their ability to identify attempts at manipulation, you have to delve into your backlinks and do a full SEO Forensics evaluation. You need to get a handle on what is causing the penalty or throttling.

Forensic SEO is the deep-diving art of locating tainted backlinks. It is only after identifying the culprits will the time consuming and difficult job of restoring your SEO back to the top ranks. It may never be possible to get fully restored.

Your falling SEO ranking is probably due to low quality backlinks. Now you may wonder what that is. Back in the early days of Google people found out they could get ranked to page one by creating a lot of links to their page from fake sites, pbn sites or list site that just were meant to influence the placing. As time passed google started to find out about the manipulations and started shutting them down.

Grey Hat is still manipulating the ranking but is more sophisticated. They follow the rules but use loopholes to get the results. These are now getting discovered and neutralized. If Google detects these manipulations they will impose penalties or reduce the effectiveness of your links.

Swift action is required when you discover the culprit so you can halt the drop. The longer it continues, the harder it is to recover. While you are gone from the top other companies will be pushing to get to the top. It is way easier to recover from say the 5th spot than the 50th spot. If it is a simple error or notice of penalty from one of the search engines it may be easy to discover. Otherwise, you need to do a deep dive into your backlinks to find the cause.

Since your drop in rank has caused by improper linking applied by your present SEO expert, it is time for you to find an independent freelance SEO expert with experience in Forensic SEO. If you try to fix it yourself, you may be blind to your own errors. Like many people, it is hard to see their own mistakes and we may assume that what is broken is actually fine.

An independent SEO deep dive will not have prejudgment on any links. Now, this can be a long and costly process. The loss of productivity of the site will be even more expensive. The bad links must be removed, which can actually be difficult. You have to contact the host of the link and get them to remove it. This can be a problem since it may not affect them and they will have to take their time and energy to fix it. They have no real motivation to help you.

This is why it can take so long to fix the problem links. You may even have to pay sites to eliminate bad links. Remember the links you want are from authoritative sites that have a large amount of traffic. You can not just leave comments on an article with links back to your site. That is SPAM. If you can add to the conversation and show your expertise in the subject, then you can add a link or they may even add the link themselves.

There may be several sources of problems. If an earlier link building campaign using grey or black hat SEO techniques, the attempted manipulation may now be detected. All the questionable links need to be eradicated. Only then can the work begin, to start building new links to fix the penalties or unthrottle your site.

Then comes the rebuild. You need to look for sites that are expert in your field. You might just ask them to add you as a link. More likely you need to write an article or add to the discussion on their website. By showing your expertise and putting a link in.

By the way, Google also looks at your outgoing links. If you link yourself to authoritative sites, Google sees your site as more authoritative. Put links in your articles to other sites articles. They will appreciate your link and will be much more willing to link to you.

If your looking for a forensic SEO person, I can certainly help by looking at your site deeply. I am well versed in white hat SEO but also familiar with getting rid of the results of bad SEO. This is not something you can wait out and I will make sure that your links are high quality and all technical aspects of your site are fixed.

You should also look at the possibility of redesigning your website for User Experience. That is how the website flows to guide the visitor to your site to perform an action. One of the metrics that Google watches is Click Through Rates or CTR. They also look at how long people stay on your page. So if you can guide the visitor to your action page and they actually do something, that is great.

There is a myriad of tools that can help you optimize your site. Between analytics, heat mapping and test audiences. You need to hone the visiting experience. Use AB testing to try different things. Eventually, you can get back to the number one spot.