6 year old website 301 redirects and Big Drop

Hi guys;
Actually, I'm not angry at Google here, I'm just trying to understand why.

6 Years Psychology Blog Site The Graphic below is from the last 3 months and was redirected to a different domain with 301 3 months ago. This is the search console data of the new redirected domain.

It had been going stably for 6 years. 50-60 unique visitors and 2,000 impressions per day.

However, it hit a bottom on March 6. Then there was a bottom on March 12 and it is still at low levels now.

The contents are of medium quality. It is a medium quality blog site, there was about 200 content and there has been no new content entry for 8 months.

Since I have been in this industry for 15 years, I have encountered a few situations like this. However, I have difficulty understanding why there is such a large decrease.

I experienced the same situation again on another similar website in the last 6 months. (It is also a 6-year-old website and has not received updates for the last 6 months.)

Is there anyone experiencing the same situation?
I would like to exchange ideas on this subject.
Good luck everybody.




This is the old domain and search console data before 301.
There has been no problem with 301 domain redirection so far.

It got caught in the update. Google said it was for AI but as you said no post in last 8 months so that can be the reason for this site getting affected .

awesomewebsites said:

It got caught in the update. Google said it was for AI but as you said no post in last 8 months so that can be the reason for this site getting affected .

Click to expand...

I think it is like that too, but such a serious decline is a great cruelty and I have no idea if they will fix it. Again, our local language blog site, which was not updated for at least 8 months, experienced a drop in hits on March 5th. By about 20%.

However, the viewing rates of the site above seem to have dropped by 95%.

aydinasuh said:

I think it is like that too, but such a serious decline is a great cruelty and I have no idea if they will fix it. Again, our local language blog site, which was not updated for at least 8 months, experienced a drop in hits on March 5th. By about 20%.

However, the viewing rates of the site above seem to have dropped by 95%.

Click to expand...

These frequent updates have made blogging very risky and unpredictable business already. If you are able to regain the rankings, I suggest you to sell the website. You will get good money from the sale as it has earnings for 6 years and you can use the money to do some other business where you have more control.

As you can see you was warned in september 2023 about your content - the impressions / clicks dropped. In march 2024 the content update migrated with the core update (or still migrating). And this is the result.

You say that your content has medium quality. Look at it again or have a friend look over it and rate it neutrally. He will probably find some trashy content among all the medium content.

What you can do: check your content - be fair with what you see. If it has 0 value for USERS, delete it or set it to no-index. Fresh content is sometimes important, but depends on content ... if you write about tech, it should be up to date. If you write about sew and knit, it can be super old and still rank - if the content is good. If it's too much work, drink a tea. ;D

Imagine there are some sites that have 15-30k posts. And google has removed about 50% of the traffic in March. In principle, that means that 50% of all the posts were probably pure rubbish. So you would have to check 50% of the posts and throw them out of the index or rewrite them.

Even if you deliver perfect content now, there will probably only be the first major signs of progress in 3-6 months. The squirrel feeds hard ;D

Bhikku said:

As you can see you was warned in september 2023 about your content - the impressions / clicks dropped. In march 2024 the content update migrated with the core update (or still migrating). And this is the result.

You say that your content has medium quality. Look at it again or have a friend look over it and rate it neutrally. He will probably find some trashy content among all the medium content.

What you can do: check your content - be fair with what you see. If it has 0 value for USERS, delete it or set it to no-index. Fresh content is sometimes important, but depends on content ... if you write about tech, it should be up to date. If you write about sew and knit, it can be super old and still rank - if the content is good. If it's too much work, drink a tea. ;D

Imagine there are some sites that have 15-30k posts. And google has removed about 50% of the traffic in March. In principle, that means that 50% of all the posts were probably pure rubbish. So you would have to check 50% of the posts and throw them out of the index or rewrite them.

Even if you deliver perfect content now, there will probably only be the first major signs of progress in 3-6 months. The squirrel feeds hard ;D

Click to expand...

You're right, I totally agree. This is actually a revised version of the contents, but I think it was not enough. I realized that it is better not to write content than to write poor quality content. Because even if you edit backwards, it's never the same, and even medium-quality content doesn't mean much unless you create excellent content.

Yes, i tried to improve my content on my site in sommer 2023 too, with small tasks like adding faq - updating the top 3 products in the article or get more value for users like adding pro / con lists. But this is not enough

Dont edit bad old content. The writing style is different and you will waste much time to rewrite it. Just write a new article. And DONT Focus on SEO so much:
Imagine google has looked at your site and probably 10 of your competitors. The content was similar everywhere. But what is google supposed to rank in the top 10 if they all have the same SEO guides and optimise the content accordingly? Exactly, none at all or perhaps only high DA/DR pages. The rest is replaced by trashy forum rankings, still better than niche sites, at least that's what google thinks. Is google going too far with this update? Yup, they will probably realise it themselves soon.

So just write the content for users, the way you would like to read it if you were searching for the topic.

Quality content is the king. you can either do as @awesomewebsites says or update your website with quality in depth content which will be useful for the users. Editing the old content is time consuming,instead try publish one or two articles a day and see.