Systemic solutions for a complete core algorithm update recovery.

Since the August 1, 2018 Google algorithm update, a publisher site for health, nutrition, and fitness was seeing site traffic decline.

Riddled with thousands of low-quality URLs, the site was suffering from duplicate, highly similar, and overlapping content pages. Often, this meant Google struggled to identify which URL was the best one to rank for a specific query.

In addition, much of its content was now considered by Google to be “dangerous medical advice” due to its growing emphasis on expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T), especially within “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) content.

We addressed systemic issues with a range of solutions for consolidating content, reducing noise, and expediting our analysis — while executing a massive content clean-up for 13,000+ URLs.

• Performed a preliminary analysis to identify the topics where the site is considered an authority, and where it lacks E-A-T
• Consolidated content with content migration, blanket redirects, and more
• Audited content for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness
• Synthesized visibility and performance metrics to grow E-A-T
• Overlayed various data points with SEO tools for deeper insights
• Improved site architecture to better reflect our depth of topic coverage
• Reduced site dataset from two million URL and keyword combinations to 193,000

With these changes, we knew that we wouldn’t likely see a significant improvement in performance until the next core update rolled out, as Google has stated numerous times that it takes a significant amount of time to process large-scale, site-wide, quality improvements.

When Google launched its June 2021 Core Update — the results of our hard work started pouring in.