I Recovered from the March Update!!!

[georgetoons]

Thanks for reply. What is your outreach strategy to land guest posts?

Since I mainly make guest posts on sites related to the niche they say yes quite often, I just show them a few examples of previous posts and how they performed and tell them that I believe there viewers will engage nicely with our content. Send like 10-20 of those emails a day when looking for guest posts.

 

[Dilly.]

Hi BHW fam,

So my biggest client which pays about 40% of my houses income for the past 10+ years was hit big by the March core update.

Over 300 suburb pages where hit, they went from ranking in the top 3 positions for over 10 years to being non existent, they where still indexed but none existent....

It was like Google put us in punishment until we learn our lesson.

This whole situation caused my client to think he will need to close the business due to no work for his workers (it is a removalist company). Him closing the business means my family needs to start finding some other Jobs for a bit... So would of been a big change.

But luckily that didn't need to happen... Because yesterday night like 70% of the 300 suburbs all came back, mainly in the same positions as before but most of them even better than before.

I don't know what saved it to be honest as we made so many changes over the past month to try and save the site but I will share all the different things we tried:

1. First thing we did was rewrite any AI Content to make it more helpful and original, this took a long time.
2. I added some more high quality backlinks to hopefully give it some strength
3. we removed all AI images
4. I removed all american/english spelled words and made them british/engish as the customer is based in Australia.
5. After researching competitors I also deleted lots of content and the pages went from 1200 words average to about 600-700 words.
6. About a week ago I had decided to delete all the pages as Google sees them as "Doorway Pages", but a day after trashing them all I decided to bring them all back as they are our main traffic sources for over 10 years.

And last night it recovered.

Now... was it because of something I did? no idea. Was it because Google crawled the site again and just changed its mind? maybe. I guess we will never know but very happy I was able to bring it back and I hope you all find a solution that will work.

Share your thoughts or questions below

Thank you

I like reading stories like this, you faced an issue and worked your ass off to fix it.
You also gave it effort, and your client should be very proud.

But wow, how scary is it to know that you have been in business 10 years and one day it randomly gets destroyed essentially by Google. That is a nightmare you probably weren't happy to realize.

 

[georgetoons]

I like reading stories like this, you faced an issue and worked your ass off to fix it.
You also gave it effort, and your client should be very proud.

But wow, how scary is it to know that you have been in business 10 years and one day it randomly gets destroyed essentially by Google. That is a nightmare you probably weren't happy to realize.

Thank you and yes he is very happy that we where able to revive his business, he was having a very hard time and was very worried during the time so we where working day and night to try and fix the issue. Showing your customers that you care and it is not only business I believe helps a lot with building long term client relationships.

And yes in general most of my clients have traffic coming from multiple sources so it was not so urgent as the case of this site, have been building new traffic sources for this client now to prevent something like this being so catastrophic although with his niche it is not so easy.

 

[randyseoppc]

Hi BHW fam,

So my biggest client which pays about 40% of my houses income for the past 10+ years was hit big by the March core update.

Over 300 suburb pages where hit, they went from ranking in the top 3 positions for over 10 years to being non existent, they where still indexed but none existent....

It was like Google put us in punishment until we learn our lesson.

This whole situation caused my client to think he will need to close the business due to no work for his workers (it is a removalist company). Him closing the business means my family needs to start finding some other Jobs for a bit... So would of been a big change.

But luckily that didn't need to happen... Because yesterday night like 70% of the 300 suburbs all came back, mainly in the same positions as before but most of them even better than before.

I don't know what saved it to be honest as we made so many changes over the past month to try and save the site but I will share all the different things we tried:

1. First thing we did was rewrite any AI Content to make it more helpful and original, this took a long time.
2. I added some more high quality backlinks to hopefully give it some strength
3. we removed all AI images
4. I removed all american/english spelled words and made them british/engish as the customer is based in Australia.
5. After researching competitors I also deleted lots of content and the pages went from 1200 words average to about 600-700 words.
6. About a week ago I had decided to delete all the pages as Google sees them as "Doorway Pages", but a day after trashing them all I decided to bring them all back as they are our main traffic sources for over 10 years.

And last night it recovered.

Now... was it because of something I did? no idea. Was it because Google crawled the site again and just changed its mind? maybe. I guess we will never know but very happy I was able to bring it back and I hope you all find a solution that will work.

Share your thoughts or questions below

Thank you

Content is king, and removing the AI generated content, I believe is the biggest contributor in reviving your website's ranking.

 

[chrisyoungsd]

Content is king, and removing the AI generated content, I believe is the biggest contributor in reviving your website's ranking.

Do you think a mix of using SurferSEO Humanizer alongside some manual edits would be sufficient?

 

[randyseoppc]

Do you think a mix of using SurferSEO Humanizer alongside some manual edits would be sufficient?

Yes, along with that don't forget to SEO optimise the content by adding relevant keywords, a SurferSEO score of 70 above should be good enough to improve the rankings.

 

[Livegeneral]

Thank you and yes he is very happy that we where able to revive his business, he was having a very hard time and was very worried during the time so we where working day and night to try and fix the issue. Showing your customers that you care and it is not only business I believe helps a lot with building long term client relationships.

And yes in general most of my clients have traffic coming from multiple sources so it was not so urgent as the case of this site, have been building new traffic sources for this client now to prevent something like this being so catastrophic although with his niche it is not so easy.

How did you do the redirects for all your deleted content? 404s, 410s, in GSC removal?

 

[georgetoons]

How did you do the redirects for all your deleted content? 404s, 410s, in GSC removal?

Well to be honest with you we had done 410 on them all and I day later brought them all back.

 

[Livegeneral]

Since I mainly make guest posts on sites related to the niche they say yes quite often, I just show them a few examples of previous posts and how they performed and tell them that I believe there viewers will engage nicely with our content. Send like 10-20 of those emails a day when looking for guest posts.

Ahh so you left the content live while you were removing all the AI content?

1. After researching competitors I also deleted lots of content and the pages went from 1200 words average to about 600-700 words

Was this an overtime process then?

1. we removed all AI images

And how did you deal with finding new images? Stock?


Also great job on the recovery and thanks for the replies!

 

[georgetoons]

Ahh so you left the content live while you were removing all the AI content

A: No I had drafted them all while removing content and making edits and published one by one as they where completed

Was this an overtime process then?

A: yes this was about 1- 1.5 months

And how did you deal with finding new images? Stock?

A: Freepik and images taken by the business owner.

Also great job on the recovery and thanks for the replies!

Thank you very much I hope you also recover if you are going through the same

 

[SuperProxyShop]

Regarding Point 4: there are several noticeable differences between Australian English and British English, did you include any local words or phrases in your text or it was just classic British version?

 

[georgetoons]

Regarding Point 4: there are several noticeable differences between Australian English and British English, did you include any local words or phrases in your text or it was just classic British version?

Yes I implemented lots of Australian local terms and sayings mainly in the blog posts of the website. I really believe it has helped a lot!

 

[Ozzyzig]

Reducing average word count from 1200 to 600 had a positive impact ? Is this something now ? Now , Google does not want detailed guides from us anymore ?

600 words of high quality content will always be better than 1200 words of fluff

 

[Livegeneral]

Yes I implemented lots of Australian local terms and sayings mainly in the blog posts of the website. I really believe it has helped a lot!

Ahh, is the business local in Australia? I didn't ask, what type of site is it. I have noticed that some e commences have been able to recover but no informational/affiliate sites so far.

 

[georgetoons]

Ahh, is the business local in Australia? I didn't ask, what type of site is it. I have noticed that some e commences have been able to recover but no informational/affiliate sites so far.

Yes local in Australia and it is a service site in the removalist niche, not ecom

 

[Bram Joosten 12]

This is also a lesson for you and your customers. You have to diversify their traffic sources so that it doesn't happen again.

 

[georgetoons]

Do you think a mix of using SurferSEO Humanizer alongside some manual edits would be sufficient?

We do something like that but we do a lot of manual edits as of lately, but from what we have seen the main goal here is to provide a lot of VALUE through your content without sounding like a bot. (even tho google still ranks sites talking about nothing)

 

[AndyMac]

1. First thing we did was rewrite any AI Content to make it more helpful and original, this took a long time.
2. I added some more high quality backlinks to hopefully give it some strength
3. we removed all AI images
4. I removed all american/english spelled words and made them british/engish as the customer is based in Australia.
5. After researching competitors I also deleted lots of content and the pages went from 1200 words average to about 600-700 words.
6. About a week ago I had decided to delete all the pages as Google sees them as "Doorway Pages", but a day after trashing them all I decided to bring them all back as they are our main traffic sources for over 10 years.

I've gone through a similar process with established sites that were impacted.

For example, a process that *used* to work was to produce Listicles that would get on Google Discover using an 'illustration' style AI image via Midjourney... these articles were LOOOOOONG but had awesome scroll through rates and earned big coin....

But, around December 2023/January 2024, Discover came to a halt...

Since then, been through a process of reducing hundreds of articles that had thousands of word content, deleted heaps of articles that weren't getting any Search traffic at all (trying to work on the quality vs quantity angle), removed AI images based on underlying presumptions they were a problem (ie, SERP features were dissapearing), etc, etc...

But making progress has been difficult, it's only in the last week things have started to pick-up but that's being seen across many sites.

However, what I can say is that despite all these troubles on long established sites that are now basically worthless, what has been working is starting brand new sites with effectively the same type of content with mildly adjusted strategies (ie, shorter content, which is somewhat ironic because AI tools are great at pumping out short articles), embedding social proof (ie, Insta/Youtube iframes), and making sure those users that visit are compelled to scroll.

The other curious thing is that Ad Networks can also penalise your success - whether it's because of the Ads to Content ratio, or because of their impact on the Pagespeed metrics, or simply because users hate Ads... I can't say...

But, I've seen repetitive examples of turning Ads off on a site and traffic recovering... then being bewildered by this... turning ads back on since I want to earn money, and then watching traffic plummet... then turning ads back off... and traffic recovers. The results in these experiments were apparent after just 3-5 days, it's an interesting situation. I'm yet to work out if using direct AdSense programs have the same impact because getting approval with new sites in AdSense is painful.

 

[georgetoons]

I've gone through a similar process with established sites that were impacted.

For example, a process that *used* to work was to produce Listicles that would get on Google Discover using an 'illustration' style AI image via Midjourney... these articles were LOOOOOONG but had awesome scroll through rates and earned big coin....

But, around December 2023/January 2024, Discover came to a halt...

Since then, been through a process of reducing hundreds of articles that had thousands of word content, deleted heaps of articles that weren't getting any Search traffic at all (trying to work on the quality vs quantity angle), removed AI images based on underlying presumptions they were a problem (ie, SERP features were dissapearing), etc, etc...

But making progress has been difficult, it's only in the last week things have started to pick-up but that's being seen across many sites.

However, what I can say is that despite all these troubles on long established sites that are now basically worthless, what has been working is starting brand new sites with effectively the same type of content with mildly adjusted strategies (ie, shorter content, which is somewhat ironic because AI tools are great at pumping out short articles), embedding social proof (ie, Insta/Youtube iframes), and making sure those users that visit are compelled to scroll.

The other curious thing is that Ad Networks can also penalise your success - whether it's because of the Ads to Content ratio, or because of their impact on the Pagespeed metrics, or simply because users hate Ads... I can't say...

But, I've seen repetitive examples of turning Ads off on a site and traffic recovering... then being bewildered by this... turning ads back on since I want to earn money, and then watching traffic plummet... then turning ads back off... and traffic recovers. The results in these experiments were apparent after just 3-5 days, it's an interesting situation. I'm yet to work out if using direct AdSense programs have the same impact because getting approval with new sites in AdSense is painful.

How are the sites going now? did you end up buying new domains for them all and seeing success?

I was lucky enough to be able to recover the sites on any clients effected by focusing a lot on the content, making it fun, engaging and "valuable". Also not repeating myself as from experience AI tends to repeat itself a lot on certain points. Also some words I have noticed AI likes to us a lot like "seamless" "reliable and efficient" "whether your" and much more.