RESOURCES & LINKS:
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Sucuri: https://sucuri.net/
Screaming Frog: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
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One thing I want you to do is check the URL on this screen. It’s a penalty indicator. So you can go to that URL and it’ll show you if your traffic loss is related to Google algorithm update. In addition to that, I want you to check Google search console for a manual penalty. Because if you have a manual penalty and they tell you what it’s for, you need to fix that as well.
Now, if you have a traffic drop from a specific algorithm update, it doesn’t mean there’s a penalty necessarily, right? It just means Google had just set algorithm that sometimes you’ll gain more traffic, sometimes you lose some traffic, sometimes you stay roughly the same.
The first thing you need to do is go to Ubersuggest and run an SEO audit. So there’s a site audit feature within Ubersuggest. And what it’ll do is it’ll break down your overall site, the health, your load speed. It’ll look at Google core web vitals and any issues.
Number two, check your website for malware. I want you to use Sucuri to scan your website for malware as well. You can go to the URL on the screen, sitecheck.sucuri.net, and that’ll help you figure out that, “Hey, is something wrong happening?”
Next, I want you to run a link audit. You’ll be shocked. Sometimes, you’ll get really bad sites from adult sites or gambling sites or pill sites linking to you that you don’t want just because someone’s trying to tarnish your rankings. So go to Ubersuggest and put in your URL and see if there’s any links that look shady and look at the anchor text.
Ubersuggest will break down the anchor text of the sites linking to you if you see any funny keywords, like any pill names like Cialis or Viagra, and funny enough, believe it or not, we see this sometimes in the client sites. You want to get all this stuff cleaned up, disavow them, try to remove them. And in most cases, Google’s really good. They don’t really try to penalize you for bad links that they know that you may have not created.
What are the keywords that used to rank for, but don’t rank for? I recommend searching for each of those keywords on Google. Look at all the sites that are ranking at the top. What are their articles covering that yours don’t? Is it that yours is still an outdated? Is it that their’s way more thorough and in-depth?
And I’ll take the content from the weaker one and make sure anything I didn’t talk about in the stronger page also includes those elements. In addition to that, I would go back and use Screaming Frog and crawl my site to see if any of my internal pages also links to the weaker article and I would change those URLs to the newer one.
So on top of doing the 301 redirect, you need to change your internal links as well to ensure that you’re updating your site.
Lastly, what I would do is make sure you delete any content that is irrelevant. You don’t need a site with a million pages. You’re not Wikipedia. You’re not New York Times. It’s better to have a thousand pages or a hundred pages that are super, super strong, and in-depth and thorough, than 5 million pages with 99% of them being weak, thin content that no one cares to read.
You’re spreading your juice, your authority, to too many pages that are weak and it can actually hurt your ranking versus having less content. About.com, which is owned by the New York Times, eventually got rid of the domain name “about.com,” split their site into a handful of sites that are more niche-based.
They deleted thousands of pages of content and they saw their traffic go up because they focused their authority on relevant articles that are super useful to people versus irrelevant ones.
So if you use those strategies and implement them, you can recover your traffic.
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