Health + Wellness Publisher
Systemic solutions for a complete Google core algorithm update recovery.
Expertise
SEO
Industries
Enterprise News & Publishers
We developed a holistic recovery strategy for a health and wellness publisher site to help revert a years-long, negative traffic trend.
37%
MORE SITE CLICKS
32%
MORE IMPRESSIONS
30%
MORE ORGANIC USERS
THE CHALLENGE
13,000+ URLs led to one huge problem.
Since one of the first Google core algorithm updates, a leading 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. This often meant that 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 experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), especially within “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) content.
THE STRATEGY
A multi-pronged approach to improve site quality.
Our recovery strategy centered on an in-depth audit to systematically improve quality and authority across all areas — from reducing low-quality content to overhauling site architecture, earning trustworthy backlinks, and regularly monitoring analytics. By executing coordinated improvements holistically, we aimed to recover from years of declines after Google’s core updates and meet current standards for expertise and authoritativeness.
THE SOLUTION
Complete content overhaul + a system of solutions.
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-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-E-A-T
- Overlayed various data points with SEO tools for deeper insight
- 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 next core update, the results of our hard work started pouring in.
THE RESULTS
Total recovery + new Google Discover traffic.
After implementing our coordinated quality improvements, the site saw dramatic gains, including organic traffic increases across the board, with clicks up 37%, impressions up 32%, and users up 30%. The site also gained new visibility in Google Discover. With organic sessions projected to increase by 59 million annually, these remarkable gains underscored the success of our holistic recovery strategy in meeting Google’s higher standards. Our systemic solutions enabled the site to reverse previous declines and completely recover.
37%
MORE SITE CLICKS
32%
MORE IMPRESSIONS
30%
MORE ORGANIC USERS
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