Recovered after Update, What is happening?

Hello Guys,

My website was hit last year in October by the Google Spam Update and I lost 99% of my keywords and traffic. I turned to this forum last year to see similar reports and many suffered the same fate.

The observation I made back then was, that upon submitting my sitemap the discovered url count was always set to 0 (zero) when before the update it displayed the number of existing URL´s just fine. I had people in here report the same thing and we suspected that this kind of was the way of how Google was showing that the sites where shadowbanned and about to be de-indexed because of suspected or actual spam!

I did not make an effort to update my content to please Google because I had given up and left the site active and running for a year now with the site getting barely 6 klicks a week contrary to about 800 a week before the update.

Now just out of curiosity I checked Ahrefs not hoping for anything and suddenly my traffic went up to 102 (+95 increase) and keywords went up to 204 (+199 increase).

What´s more: GSC is finally displaying the URL count next to my site map again.

What is happening? The site was completely dead for a year and I did absolutely nothing with it since then.

What you guys thinking?

Greetings,
Benz

sites do come back up after some updates, just not 1 year later... or not very often anyway. Consider yourself lucky and milk the site while this lasts

Congratulations that you got recovered. Just take the best out of it, who knows next update might be a nightmare for you!

You got lucky haha. Its great this happened, no one understands what Google updates are doing so don't waste your time thinking about it

It appears that the update was successful and the system has been restored to its original state.

Good to see you recovered. Nice reading about these things

If you've recovered, it's likely due to Google refining the update after initial rollout or your site's recent improvements kicking in. Keep a close eye on GSC for crawl errors or manual actions, and continue improving user experience and content quality.