What if an SEO company causes ranking drops?

First check whether the evidence points to its work, by matching the dates of its changes and the pages it touched against when and where traffic fell. Matching dates and pages is strong evidence, not proof, so rule out the other causes before treating the company’s work as the cause. If the evidence points to a specific change, the company should find it, reverse or correct it, and show you what it did, as part of the work you already paid for. Establishing the cause comes first because a drop has other possible causes. Google’s guide to debugging drops in Search traffic lists algorithmic updates, technical issues, security issues, spam issues, seasonality and changing interests, and reporting glitches among them.

Match the changes to the drop

Ask the company for a dated record of every change it made to your site: templates, titles, redirects, canonical tags, robots.txt rules, removed or merged pages, and content edits. Search Console records how your pages performed on each date, but it does not record what was changed on your site. You can add that context yourself. Search Console’s annotations let you add a note to the Performance chart for a specific date, described by Google as notes “to mark important events specific to your property, such as when you launch a new feature, or fix a bug on your website.” Any owner or full user of the property can add them, a property holds up to 200, and notes older than 500 days are deleted automatically. They do not appear when the chart is in comparison mode, so check them on the single date range first. Asking the company to annotate each change on the day it goes live gives you a timeline you can read against the traffic line.

Then compare where the drop happened with what was touched. Filter the Performance report by page and look at whether the losses sit on the pages the company changed. Also check the shape of the decline, because a technical error does not always cause a sudden fall. Google’s guide notes that a page-level problem such as “a misplaced noindex tag” would depend on Google crawling the page, “meaning there would be a slower drop in traffic.” A gradual decline that starts after a change can therefore still trace back to that change.

Before treating the company’s work as the cause, rule out the others. Compare the date against Google’s list of ranking updates, compare the same months in the previous year to see whether demand is seasonal, and check the security and manual actions reports in Search Console.

The technical errors that cause drops

Several of the errors an SEO company can introduce show up in the Page indexing report, and Google’s debugging guide recommends checking it, along with the Crawl stats report, to see whether there is “a corresponding spike in issues detected” around the date of the drop. The reasons the report gives map onto common mistakes. A noindex directive left on pages that should rank appears with the reason “URL marked ‘noindex'” in the report, and Google’s instruction is plain: “If you do want this page to be indexed, you should remove the ‘noindex’ directive.” A robots.txt rule that is too broad appears as “URL blocked by robots.txt” in the same report. Faulty redirects appear as a redirect error, and Google lists “A redirect chain that was too long” and “A redirect loop” among the causes.

Not every problem that appears during an engagement is the company’s doing. Some were already on the site, and some are caused by a developer, a plugin, or a platform update. The change record is what separates the company’s errors from the rest, which is a second reason to require one.

Fixing it without making things worse

The fix should target the change that caused the problem, not a round of new changes. Correcting one identified cause and then watching the result makes it possible to tell whether the fix worked. Google’s guide makes a related point about small shifts in position: “we recommend avoiding making radical changes if your page is already performing well.”

After the fix, the company can ask Google to recrawl the corrected pages. Google’s guidance on recrawling sets two expectations: there is a quota, and “requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won’t get it crawled any faster.” It also says: “Requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all.” If a page still shows the error in the Page indexing report after the fix, check its last crawl date. Google’s own explanation is: “Perhaps you fixed the issue AFTER the last Google crawl.”

Who pays for the correction

Correcting an error in work the company was paid to do is part of delivering that work, so it should not come back to you as new billable hours. Whether your contract supports that position depends on its terms for scope, revisions, and quality, and if the company disputes it, a lawyer can review the contract with you.

Raising it and what to watch for

Raise the issue in writing. Describe what you saw, when you noticed it, and which change you believe is connected, and ask the company to confirm the cause, give a date for the fix, and confirm in writing when it is done. Ask as well what it will change in how it works, such as testing changes on a staging copy of the site before they go live, and annotating every change it makes. A company that will not share its change record, cannot say what it changed, or bills you to repair its own error has given you the information you need to reconsider the engagement.