Average position going down despite high on-site optimization and newly acquired niche backlinks

[ruruuu99]

Hello,

I'm really struggling to figure out where things are going wrong. So to put it simply, our website is on the first page for the most searched keywords in our niche, but it's right at the bottom. As in we're hanging by the thread - any little Google update and we could be kicked off to the second page.

Can't tell you how many times I've ran SEO reports/audits and the score is always high. Everything is almost 100 on PageSpeed Insights. Have checked our competitors' websites and all of their optimizations are below ours.

Although most of our backlinks are from business/local directories, we have recently obtained new high authority links from niche websites - where we actually contacted the website owners with articles and they have linked back to us after publishing the content.

We used to rank a bit higher on the first page (more towards the bottom middle of the page), but after an eye-watering Google update, we went RIGHT down to being the very last result on the page. Some of our competitors which used to rank higher have also gone down, so it didn't affect just us.

But every day when I check the avg. position for the given keyword, it sneakily goes down by 0.1?? The position remains unchanged, but I fear that a few more of those -0.1's and we'll be back to the second page.

I've ran some Ahrefs reports and they indicate that we have some broken CSS/Javascript from a plugin that makes our website super fast. Could this be negatively affecting our SEO?

Any advice and insight into this frustrating matter would be much appreciated!!

 

[ruruuu99]

And for reference, we used to have the cover image and sitelinks appear in the SERPs on both mobile and desktop.

Since the update, everything disappeared and that went hand in hand with our reduced rank, lower CTR, etc.

I have checked many times on GSC, Schema.org and other platforms - they all say that we have valid structured data. Nothing was tampered with, but Google just decided to "wipe off" our rich results.

 

[Community]

I've seen a number of results like this recently when doing audits for people, most have seen a steady decline in traffic and/or user metrics from referring sites.

Have you been or previously been doing any CTR work and/or more social media work generating traffic from multiple sources ?

Id test to see if any kind of "buzz" correlates into any kind of improvement initially, 10x niche edits or guest posts, press release and distribution, daily or twice dailly social posts across all platforms, 50+ citation build.

All done at the same time so you can measure viral type noise as a baseline, I suspect the drop in traffic and userbility metrics is a contributing factor that just gets compounded the lower down it slips.

 

[Tornadoo]

It sounds frustrating—especially after optimizing so much. If you’ve used services like Adsense or Aads before and stopped what have you done? They can also provide backlinks and mentions to different websites. Some of those links might disappear when you stop using them and can have an impact on your rankings. They are not causing any problems if you haven’t used them. It might be worth trying them to ask if more targeted traffic can help with improving your search rankings.

 

[John_Collinson]

Those small daily position drops (-0.1) are concerning. Since your technical SEO is solid, let's focus on what's likely happening:
The broken CSS/JavaScript from your speed plugin is absolutely worth investigating immediately. Even if PageSpeed Insights shows good scores, real-world rendering issues can trigger negative user signals that Google tracks.
Also, check your GSC for any Coverage or Enhancement issues - sometimes there are hidden problems not caught by standard audits.
Your recent high-quality backlinks might need more time to fully impact rankings, but I'd double-check if any older important backlinks were lost during the update.
If you're using any structured data, verify it's still working correctly after the update.
Good luck with the fix!

 

[ruruuu99]

I've seen a number of results like this recently when doing audits for people, most have seen a steady decline in traffic and/or user metrics from referring sites.

Have you been or previously been doing any CTR work and/or more social media work generating traffic from multiple sources ?

Id test to see if any kind of "buzz" correlates into any kind of improvement initially, 10x niche edits or guest posts, press release and distribution, daily or twice dailly social posts across all platforms, 50+ citation build.

All done at the same time so you can measure viral type noise as a baseline, I suspect the drop in traffic and userbility metrics is a contributing factor that just gets compounded the lower down it slips.

Interesting to see that there is an ongoing pattern with reduced traffic/metrics.

We post on social media ocassionally (hardly ever on Instagram, more so on facebook) and the posts always have links to different pages of the website - whether it's a new blog article, announcement, etc.

Would posting on social media more regularly give a traffic boost? Must admit we don't post that often so it's probably an area of improvement!!

I suspect our CTR is low cause we're at the bottom, even though the impressions are high. Perhaps low CTR:high impressions ratio negatively affects SEO?

 

[ruruuu99]

It sounds frustrating—especially after optimizing so much. If you’ve used services like Adsense or Aads before and stopped what have you done? They can also provide backlinks and mentions to different websites. Some of those links might disappear when you stop using them and can have an impact on your rankings. They are not causing any problems if you haven’t used them. It might be worth trying them to ask if more targeted traffic can help with improving your search rankings.

Never used Adsense or Aads before. We did hire an SEO agency to do the link building work for us in the beginning, but their efforts had no effect on our ranking and we were still on the second page. After doing some research and taking things into our own hands, it turns out most of the backlinks were flagged as "toxic" as they were from irrelevant, low authority websites/link farms.

Ended up disavowing them and it seems to have had no negative effect on our SEO.

Our efforts now are more focused on building niche backlinks from high authority, relevant websites. I believe Google prioritises quality over quantity when it comes to links?

Here's to hoping that their "link juice" will start to kick in soon!

 

[ruruuu99]

Those small daily position drops (-0.1) are concerning. Since your technical SEO is solid, let's focus on what's likely happening:
The broken CSS/JavaScript from your speed plugin is absolutely worth investigating immediately. Even if PageSpeed Insights shows good scores, real-world rendering issues can trigger negative user signals that Google tracks.
Also, check your GSC for any Coverage or Enhancement issues - sometimes there are hidden problems not caught by standard audits.
Your recent high-quality backlinks might need more time to fully impact rankings, but I'd double-check if any older important backlinks were lost during the update.
If you're using any structured data, verify it's still working correctly after the update.
Good luck with the fix!

Yes, I believe the sneaky broken CSS/Javascript may have lowered our ranking as the timing of when those issues were flagged more or less coincides with the drop in our average position.

We hired someone to fix it and our position went up by 0.1, not sure if it's related to that or if it's another Google fluctuation.

I will double check any hidden problems in GSC. I periodically check the structured data and run the Rich Results Test, but everything comes back green and correct.

It's a shame because when our position on the 1st page dropped, the cover image and sitelinks all disappeared at the same time.

So frustrating when all the reports/checks come out clean but none of it matters to Google!!

Your advice is much appreciated though!