Recover From ANY Google Algorithm Update

Many of us SEOs, blog owners, and SEO agencies have experienced this. But is there any way we can get our traffic back? Some people reportedly get their traffic back without doing anything after a couple of weeks or months. And some sites just died completely even after making so many adjustments, like being rolled over by a steamroller. So in this video, we'll go over some of the things you should keep in mind if your site ever receives an

update

and in what situations you should do something about it. And if you're still with us until the end, we'll share with you the biggest mistake to avoid during this period of uncertainty and the things you can do to prepare for future

algorithm

update

s.

Come on. Hi, I'm Jack from Rank Math, the only WordPress SEO plugin constantly striving to bring you the fastest, most cutting-edge SEO tools. And on this channel, we will provide you with the most up-to-date SEO knowledge. So if you're new to our channel, consider subscribing. Anyway, before we get into the details, this is a big disclaimer. Despite all the efforts you make to save your website, there is a chance that it will never

recover

. But what we are going to share in this video will increase the chances of

recover

y. So buckle up. Now, before we go into panic mode and do something we'll regret later...

Calm down. Because panic leads to overreacting, which then leads to rash decisions, which more often than not leads to regret. That's life 101. It applies to everything in life. Relationships, business, stock market and everything. I'm digressing. Now, it is important to keep in mind that each Google

algorithm

update is different. Sometimes they'll let you know what's happening with updates. They'll tell you which region, language, or website category will be most affected and provide guidance, like the helpful content update we cover here. Other times there are broad basic updates, meaning there is no specific topic on the agenda.

And overall, its goal is to help Google get better at evaluating content and ranking it appropriately. So if it is the first type of updates, it is easier for us to mitigate and probably avoid what is going to happen. But when it comes to a broad core update, that's what puts us in panic mode and that's our focus in this video. So what will happen if your site is ever affected by the update? Follow me... Let's check if your site was really affected by the update. You can now access Google Analytics and Search Console to determine the impact of the update and search for details about the update manually.

Or another simpler method, if you are a Rank Math Pro user and have connected your site to Google services, go to your Analysis module and under "SEO Performance". Look at this. Select the data you want on the chart and timeline. Here are all the confirmed and unconfirmed Google algorithm updates. By linking this update timeline to your site data, you'll know if your site is affected by the update. You'll get a snippet of what each update is about, and if you want to know more about the update, don't worry about going anywhere else because we've consolidated all the Google update information for you.

Any official statements made by Google, what this update is about, feedback from the entire SEO community, general insights and trends as a result of the updates, and lots of other information. In fact, we have a page dedicated to that. Keeps track of all past and present updates from Google, which is this page. So once you have identified yourself as a victim of Google updates, follow me again... Let's move on to the next step. Now, if your site is down 30% to 70%, you may want to find out what type of content is affected. Under “SEO Performance” in the Analytics module, scroll down and you will have a complete list of your contents.

Take note of these charts here which are trending downward. Now, before that, let's change the time frame of the data. Maybe 7 days or 15 days. What we want is the period of time that your site was affected, but as short as possible. Now scroll down and take note of the articles that were affected by the Google update. Technically, those that are trending down, you'll want to write them down. Alternatively, if you are using Google Analytics, you need to go to "Reports", "Engagement", "Pages & Screens" and in the top right corner, expand the time period and activate the "Compare" option.

Select the period to compare, apply it. And now you can see each of those items compared to their previous performance data. Note those that have a very downward trend. At this point, you should be able to see if the update has an effect on some previously highly ranked posts. I'll show you a method to optimize those posts so they can get back in favor of Google. What you should do next, after identifying those posts that are trending down, is try to group them by reviews, recaps, newscasts, editorials, guest posts, or any type of content that you consider relevant.

And then assess which group is most affected? If it is the review articles that received the most attention, you will want to determine if the ratio of review articles to informative publications is too high. Generally, you want to have posts that are equally or more informative than review articles, and you want to evaluate the quality of your review articles to see if the content is written by someone who has generally used the product, or if it is someone who tried to scrape information from Internet to prepare a review. If you're the one writing those reviews, you know it.

By review articles, we mean "Product A Review", "Product A vs. Product B", "Best Product for X", etc. And informative posts are posts that are useful to their readers as they provide high-quality knowledge, information, and insights. awareness to visitors to your site. If most of your guest posts are affected, it's time to evaluate the quality of your guest content and whether your guests are credible enough to speak on the topics at hand. Now, if your top-ranking articles have fallen out of favor with Google, here's what you can do. Again in the SEO Performance tab, find the top ranking post that was affected.

Click on it, scroll down, and you'll see a bunch of key phrases this article has ranked for. Do you want to review your article again to see if the information on the page is up to date and if it meets the search intent for these key phrases here? Basically, you want to provide the most up-to-date, most accurate, and most useful content that meets the search intent of the key phrases you rank for. But before you start making adjustments to your content, there's one more step: evaluate your competitors. The thing is, if your site loses traffic, it doesn't mean fewer people are searching for a key phrase.

It just means that the traffic is going somewhere else, to another site that ranks first after the update. So, since you already know which key phrases made your articles highly ranked, search for those key phrases in Google, but NOT in the browser you are logged into with a Google account. If you've always used Google Chrome, use Firefox and do the incognito search. This will give you the most accurate results. Then you'll want to visit and read those top-ranked articles to determine if there's anything clearly different about their approach. But take note, keep an open mind and be analytical.

Don't let your ego get in your way. It's easy to say your content is better than everyone else's, but that won't get you anywhere. Through this step, if you are honest with yourself, you should be able to understand why Google considers your content to be less valuable than those currently ranking. With all this information, you can start redesigning your content and beat your competitors. If all of the above doesn't work, your entire site will be affected, all articles on your site will lose their rankings or be delisted from Google, and your traffic will plummet by 80% to 90%.

This could be an indication that the quality of your site is not good in the eyes of Google. It could mean you need to work on EAT, experience, authority and reliability. And before you do something drastic like abandon ship, you should first identify if there is a Google penalty. Go to your Google Search Console and look at the manual and security actions. If there is something marked here, you must fix it to return to the game. In this case, you will not receive an update from Google, but rather a penalty. Now, what if you don't see manual actions or security issues?

That means you get an update and here's what you can do. Let me put this on the checklist for you. If you have previously outsourced your content or relied on an AI writer, but haven't put much effort into monitoring the quality of your content, it's time to do so. Visit and delve into each of these contents. And if those contents are really garbage and don't generate traffic anyway, you can check it with Rank Math Analytics module or Google Analytics, feel free to remove them completely using our Redirects module. Add a new redirect, select the 410 Removed Content option, put the URL of the article you want to remove, and create that redirect to tell Google that this article has been removed from your site.

At the same time, if you visit your posts list and under the article you have deleted, you will see that there are other articles on your site that are linked to this page. You want to remove those links to avoid 404 errors. We are currently unable to click on this to identify incoming links, but please let us know in the comments if you will find this feature useful and we may add it based on your response. What we can do now is go to our Search Console, go to "Links", expand internal links, find the page that you have deleted, click on it and you will know which pages on your site are linked to this page.

Visit those pages and remove the links. But if you don't want to delete the content, the alternative is to update it. But honestly, you should evaluate if you have time to update all the content. If there is a huge amount of junk content, it will probably take months, if not years, to update them all. In our opinion, it would be more ideal if you deleted them and rewritten them as new content. Now the next thing you can do is check your backlinks. There are different types of backlinks. Those you can control, those you have purchased and those you have earned organically.

Let's analyze each of them. The backlinks you can control are those, for example, if you have a LinkedIn account and have added your site to your profile. Those types of backlinks are fine because LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Pinterest are credible sites. But for forum sites like Reddit or Quora, don't try to add comments and optimize them with a link, for example, I will leave a comment like this "Hey, this post is great. Jack Cao ~Rank Math is the best WordPress SEO Plugin" and put that link there. It is very attractive to do it because you get backlinks easily and for free.

But this goes against Google's guidelines, as you can see here. The following are the backlinks you have purchased. Honestly, most of the time you can ignore spam links to your site and you don't even need to disavow them because Google mostly ignores them. But that is unless you have purchased backlinks. For example, $5 per 1000 links. And if that's the case, you should perform backlink audits for your site and disavow those links. You can use a tool like “Ubersuggest” and audit your domain. What this will do is produce a list of the top 100 backlinks. But we focus only on the "Follow" links.

So we want to click on that. And we want to sort them by spam score. As you can see, those with spam scores of 30% or higher should be careful with them. If you have reviewed their content and really believe it is spam. For example, links from a page that is misspelled, or from a page that appears to have been generated by an AI, comment links, or PBN links, you want to disavow. Please note that this is just for your reference. How to disavow links? Visit this page, link in description. And follow the steps. Basically you need to create a ".txt" file in this format and add all the links to this file in the file and then click on this link, select the property and upload your ".txt" file.

Remember, only backlinks with low spam scores or links that are hard to get are valuable SEO juices. Links that are easy to get, you have to be careful with them. And the links you've paid for are like apples. Rotten apples. The next question isHow does Google know if you have bought links? Good question. Some people have already answered this question and probably the best answer is this. "You buy a link from site A, millions of people buy from site A. Site A looks pretty unnatural. You look pretty unnatural." Again, this is experience, authority and reliability. And depending on the niche you're in, you may need to expose the author's identity.

For example, in the medical field, you'll obviously want to know that the author of the article is a medical professional. The same is true when you receive financial advice from a blog post. You want to know if the content is credible. And the only way Google knows if the content is credible is if the author of the page has credible social profiles, if they have written content on other sites that demonstrates experience in the field. So, to improve your E.A.T., if you have multiple authors, you'll want to have an author bio on each post.

And for author profiles on your sites, you want to link them to your social profiles. And if the author has their own sites, link to them too. And if you're the sole author of your sites, the best way to get exposure and gain "street cred" is to start a YouTube channel or podcast of both. Share your experience on those channels. If you have opportunities for interviews and guest collaborations, do it. Because Google not only evaluates you based on written content, but it also evaluates you based on everything you do on the Internet. If you only rely on your blog to gain authority and trustworthiness, it would take years.

As you can see, recovering from a Google algorithm update takes a lot of effort and it will take some time before you see results. And if you have done all the above checks and really believe that there is no reason for your site to be punished, then the only reason to explain the huge drop in traffic is that Google is testing its new algorithm to get response from its users. Sometimes they will take care of themselves when they realize that your content is the best out there. In this case, you will usually see your traffic return to normal.

We hope this all makes sense to you, and if so, can you do us a little favor and mash that thumbs up button? It really means a lot to us. Now, let's talk about the biggest mistake to avoid when your site receives an update. As we have said, panic causes regrets. I was one of the victims. You start doing a lot of research and listening to the guru's advice that links should be shorter, you should group your content into a category that makes more sense, to have better thematic relevance, you should eliminate those category pages that don't make sense. , you should change your URL structure to include the category in it, and all those SEO tips... will cause more problems for your site.

The only thing you can do when your site receives an update from Google is to change the URL or URL structure of your site. Let me emphasize this again so you understand. Any changes to your internal linking structure can have more negative impacts on your site. Maybe your site was meant to recover without any action needed, but because of what you did, you sealed the deal and your site is now dead. Anyway, let's now talk about how to prepare your website and business for future algorithm updates. Now, this is not directly related to recovering from Google algorithm updates, but we honestly consider it an essential part of every business.

First, you must diversify your traffic. If your entire business relies on a single traffic source, it represents a big risk if your site receives an update from Google; It's the end of the story for your business. And that's not what we want. We want our business to thrive even in uncertain times and the way to do that is to build an email list. When someone comes to your website, you want to entice them to sign up, for example, for your newsletter. If your site talks about web design, how about creating an email signup that says: Get new free web design templates every week?

Or something like that? The second thing is to start a YouTube channel. As we mentioned above, it not only strengthens your authority and trustworthiness but also helps you gain brand awareness and recognition. You're giving people a reason to constantly consume your content and they'll be more tempted to sign up for your email list because they know who you are. Growing an audience on Twitter, starting a podcast, or a Facebook community for your brand also works. So, with all these traffic channels working together, will you still be afraid of future Google updates? If your site's organic traffic is declining, can you use email marketing, YouTube, podcasts, or anything else to send traffic to your blog when there's new content?

Of course! And you have a good chance of recovering from the update because you have proven E.A.T. Maybe you just need to work on improving your content and be careful with manipulative links and that's it. Anyway, we hope that with this video you can find comfort in what you are facing and we sincerely hope that your site recovers. If your site is not punished, we hope you learned something from it. You can expect high-quality SEO knowledge and information from us when you subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to press the thumbs up button if you haven't already.

This is Jack from Rank Math. Stay awesome, keep your head up and keep going. See you in the next video.