Why did my Google rankings drop, and what should you do after a core update?
Diagnose in order: technical, manual, competitive, then algorithmic.
Work the causes in order of likelihood: something technical broke, then a manual action, then a competitor moved, then an algorithm update. Most drops we are called about turn out to be the first one, and people spend a week blaming Google before they check.
Step one: check your own site first
Did anything ship recently? A redesign, a plugin, a developer push, a CMS change. Then check for a sitewide noindex tag, a broken robots file, a certificate problem, redirects that stopped working, a server that is timing out for the crawler, and Search Console coverage errors. Compare the drop date against your deploy log. If they line up, you have your answer.
Step two: manual actions and quality issues
Search Console tells you directly if you have a manual action. It is rare, and it is unambiguous when it happens. While you are in there, check whether the drop is sitewide or confined to a section, because a section level drop usually points at a template or a content type rather than the whole domain.
Step three: competitors
Pull the results pages for your top terms and look at who is above you now who was not before. Sometimes nothing happened to you at all. Somebody else published something better, or a big publisher moved into your topic.
Step four: algorithm updates
Only now compare your drop date against confirmed update dates. If it matches a core update, the honest answer is that there is no switch to flip and no rollback to request. Google's guidance on core updates is consistent: improve the content. That means deeper coverage, real expertise attached to it, better structure, and removing pages that exist only to chase a keyword.
Do not panic rewrite everything in week one. Recovery from a core update typically shows up at the next update, not next Tuesday, so the work is to make the pages genuinely better and wait.
Related: How long does it take to see results from SEO?, What does an SEO audit include?, Google March 2026 Core Update, A History of Google Algorithm Updates, Googles Latest Update Pushes Us Into an AI-First SEO World, SEO services