Generally if you had ranked well without backlinks the problem should be that you don't have/update your content enough. You should update your posts at least twice a week and that should help you recover your previous rank.
Yes, we used to rank high on the first page, SERP or AI Overviews without backlinks. There are hundreds of posts; we may not update them so regularly, only check and update some of them at certain times. How would you manage so many posts if you need to update them at least twice a week?
An 85% drop usually makes me think there's something bigger going on than just a backlink problem. Backlinks can certainly help, but if the site was hit by a core update, I'd want to understand why before investing heavily in link building.
One thing I've seen repeatedly is site owners focusing on what changed after the update instead of what was already weak before it. Thin content, overlapping articles, lack of clear expertise, outdated information, poor user experience, or content that doesn't really add anything new can all contribute. In those situations, adding links sometimes improves rankings a bit, but it doesn't fully solve the underlying issue.
If I were investigating, I'd compare the pages that lost the most traffic with the pages now ranking above them. Not just backlinks, but content depth, freshness, author credibility, topical coverage, user intent, and overall quality. Some recoveries I've seen came from pruning and consolidating content. Others came from rewriting key pages entirely. The sites that recovered fastest usually figured out what Google started rewarding rather than just trying to restore what used to work.
I'd be curious whether the traffic loss was sitewide or concentrated on specific sections. That often gives the biggest clue about what's actually going on.
Thanks for the analysis. The traffic loss was sitewide, blog posts and product pages all lost their rankings. They ranked 1-2 pages; now tanked to 7-10 pages.
We rank mostly for information-intent keywords; most of them are answered by AI Overview already, or only high-authority, popular websites, or reddit, forum are ranked on the first pages. Because blog brings more traffic, it impacts us a lot.
Google used to rank us well, so we don't focus on building backlinks, and also don't have too much budget for it. Most of the backlinks are from different types of websites, not direct-related niche as ours. So we are weak in high-quality backlinks.
I'm now pruning and consolidating content to make them more valuable, but it has not worked since then. I heard that you have to provide first-hand experience, and write tips/guides that are unique and no one has ever written. But it's hard to write such content.
Someone said you can try to republish those old content with new URLs, so Google will crawl and re-evaluate your content based on your current topic authority (you may not have it previously). I haven't tried it yet. I'm afraid the old pages will lose all the accumulation it has, such as recorded index history, internal link weight, and Google's historical trust...
Wonder if someone has tried this way?
