You work on your website, optimizing it step by step, and you see increasing relevance and rankings for the respective keywords. Everything is going well and suddenly the rankings drop. What was the reason? Metadata is checked, headings, the indexing of subpages, etc. But often it is not your own website's fault. John Müller explained this in last week's Webmaster Hangout. He explained that the reasons for the falling rankings could well be due to several factors outside of your own website:
User expectations have changed
Competitors have caught up
Search algorithm has adapted
That's why it's important to not only optimize your own website but also to monitor what's happening outside of your own website on the web and with your competitors.
A short and concise "yes" was John Müller's answer to the rcs data uae question of whether it would be possible for a new blog to compete in the top positions for strong keywords without the help of paid backlinks. In general, new websites have a harder time ranking with existing websites, depending on how strong the previous competition and the trust of the respective competitors was. It is interesting that John Müller does not address the fact that purchased backlinks are mentioned in any way. Google generally recommends a "naturally developing backlink profile", which naturally increases the relevance and trust of other websites. Buying backlinks to improve your own position is publicly commented on rather negatively.
Not every subpage of a website is equally important. There are some subpages with certain services and topics that are more important than others. But how do you make that clear to Google? Firstly, by focusing on your own optimization of metadata, search engine-friendly texts, user-friendliness and, not to forget, internal linking. This was also a topic in the last Webmaster Hangout. According to John Müller, internal linking allows you to tell Google the focus of the most important topics.
It is known that the Google bot concentrates on internal linking within the texts in order to understand the context of the website. The menu bar plays a very minor role in this. With the help of internal links from the subpage with the highest traffic, namely the homepage, to the most important subpages, Google can better understand which subpages are more important than others. It would therefore be counterproductive if all subpages, depending on the size of the website, were simply linked within the homepage, because that would not give Google a complete picture