How to Recover from a Google Update: A Survival Guide

Feeling rocked by the latest Google update? You’re not imagining things; your site’s rankings may have taken a hit.

Navigating a Google algorithm update can feel like an abrupt interruption, leaving you to wonder if your site’s traffic and rankings will ever recover. This fear is real and widely shared among SEOs.

But there’s a silver lining: witnessing traffic dive can be a chance to develop a more resilient SEO strategy that recovers and improves your site’s standing. 

Drawing lessons from this experience will make your site stronger and more equipped to handle future updates.

Google’s Priority: Providing Helpful, Trustworthy Content

Staying ahead despite Google’s algorithm updates means keeping up with what the search giant values most. 

Google lists their five key search signals as meaning, relevance, quality, usability, and context. When defining how they measure quality, they say they prioritize content that is helpful. 

How does Google identify what’s “helpful?” Let’s review. 

Self-Assessing Your Content

Google’s documentation offers a series of questions you can ask yourself to self-assess your content’s helpfulness. 

These questions help you identify whether your website offers the best possible page experience for searchers. This includes providing original information, showcasing expertise, and of course, being accurate & factual. 

Some of the questions they recommend include:

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
• Is the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
• Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?

Another way to assess your content is with E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)

Google coined E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) as general guidelines for identifying the helpfulness of content.

While E-E-A-T is not technically part of the Google algorithm, their systems are designed to present helpful and reliable information that align with these four principles. 

As you assess your content, look for ways to showcase your experience and expertise on the topic. This could be by providing real world examples or stories to provide context. 

Related Reading: Google E-E-A-T: What It Is & How It Affects SEO

Spam Guidelines

Nobody likes spam, especially not Google!

To stay on Google’s good side, adhere to spam guidelines by avoiding keyword stuffing, cloaking, or manipulative linking practices that can lead to penalties.

What Google Says vs What SEOs Are Seeing

Following Google’s guidelines is important, but it still doesn’t guarantee a spot at the top of the SERPs. SEOs and web publishers are quick to give their own accounts of what they’re experiencing. 

We’ve asked a few SEO experts for their opinions on making recoveries, and also see plenty of takeaways from across the web.

Google core updates have been quite brutal for many sites in recent years, even for brands that you wouldn’t expect to be susceptible. In general, businesses should have a diversity of traffic sources through to their site and shouldn’t be overly reliant on solely Google organic traffic for business sustainability. 
Continual negative impact and decline over the course of several updates can signal a need to review everything as a whole – starting with a site’s approach to content and whether they’re sticking to their area of expertise. Beyond generic SEO signals, product/market fit seems to be a common factor at play for many sites that are negatively impacted by core updates. 
Focus heavily on providing the most value within your offering compared to any other competitors on the market as the most fundamental insurance policy against Google’s whims.

Brodie Clark, SEO Consultant at Brodie Clark Consulting

Lily Ray, a leading voice among SEOs looking to recover sites hit by an update had this to share:

First Aid for Your SEO: Immediate Post-Update Actions

When a Google update impacts your site, you shouldn’t act too quickly. Be sure to wait until a core update is fully completed before taking any action. This will be reported on Google’s Search Status Dashboard.

Core updates often take a month or more to fully roll out, so patience can be key. Google’s documentation advises when making changes, to avoid doing “quick-fixes” and “consider how you can improve your content in meaningful ways.” 

As the update finishes, here are some steps to take to start on your road to recover. 

1. Assess the Impact: How Volatile Was the Update?

First, you’ll want to understand the nature of the update and how much it impacted your website’s visibility. 

You can use tools like Semrush Sensor and Google Search Console to understand how the update has affected your site’s key metrics, such as traffic and rankings.

Plus, you can read how Google describes the update from their 

Semrush Sensor

Semrush Sensor tracks daily SERP volatility, providing industry-specific scores and insights into Google’s algorithm updates, making it a great place to start. 

To use it, select your industry to view relevant volatility scores. Regularly monitor these scores and set up alerts for fluctuations. 

Additionally, if you have a Position Tracking campaign set up, you can see your “Personal Score” in the Sensor, which is based on the target keyword list that you’re tracking. This tells you how much the update impacted your specific set of target keywords. 

In the Position Tracking tool, you’ll be able to track your website’s Visibility % and see specific keywords where the update has impacted your rankings. 

If the Sensor tells you it’s a Googlequake, you know things are gonna shake up.

Google Search Console

Next, use Google Search Console (GSC) for an impact assessment on your website specifically. GSC will show you how the update affected your site’s visibility and traffic, measured in clicks, average position, and impressions. 

This tool is very flexible, providing a range of features and reports that can be customized for different SEO needs. Therefore, there are many ways to use it.

Here’s a summary of tips to get started with GSC:

Review Performance Reports

Start by examining the Performance report for insights into changes in clicks, impressions, click through rates (CTR), and search positions. Focus on the **** range around when the update was released to identify shifts. 

To do this, find the **** filter at the top of the Performance report and choose “Compare.” Set your comparison for two equal **** ranges before and after the update.

Once you’ve done that, you should be able to see the queries where your site saw the biggest difference in clicks and impressions. 

Then, change the report to reveal the pages with the biggest drop in clicks (you can also do this for checking a drop in impressions or average position). 

These pages should be your areas of focus when looking into how to recover that traffic. For your future reference, export this GSC report with the “Export” button above the table. 

Look for patterns here, with the following questions:

Have you lost clicks from pages related to one topic, or a range of topics? 

Have you lost clicks going to a specific subfolder within your website?

Have you lost clicks going to pages that were also impacted by a previous Google update?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you’ll want to investigate further. 

For example, if you’ve lost clicks to a specific topic, go to Google, enter each keyword, and do a SERP analysis to get an idea of what IS ranking well for that topic now. Then, you can assess the weaknesses in your content compared to the pages that are now at the top. 

Recommended reading: SERP Analysis Tools & How to Use Them

Other areas to check in Google Search Console include:

• Manual Actions Report: With the Manual Actions report, you can see if your site was punished for not complying with Google’s spam policies.
• Coverage Reports: After reviewing performance, check the Coverage report to ensure no new indexing issues could affect how your pages are shown in search results.
• URL Inspection Tool: For pages that have seen a decline, use the URL Inspection Tool to verify the current index status and detect any crawl errors, ensuring that Google can access and index these pages correctly.
• Mobile Usability and Core Web Vitals Reports: Updates might penalize sites with poor user experience, so it’s important to confirm your site meets Google’s standards for mobile usability and core web vitals.

2. Run a Site Audit to Spot Technical Issues

Semrush’s Site Audit tool analyzes your website for various SEO issues that could impact your performance in search results. 

While Google’s updates tend to focus lately on content quality and helpfulness, there could be technical reasons with your website that negatively affect Google’s ability to crawl and understand it. 

To make sure your technical SEO wasn’t the reason for a traffic drop during an update, you can run a Site Audit.

This will assess things like technical SEO, on-page elements, and overall site health, offering actionable fixes for optimizing content, metadata, and site structure to enhance SEO performance. 

Be sure to especially check the Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports, since these deal with page experience issues.

If you’ve already found the pages where you saw the most drops from Google Search Console, you can configure the tool to crawl those specific pages by uploading a file of URLs as your crawl source.

Then, run the audit and review the detailed report to look for any critical issues. If there are no errors or warnings, then you can probably assume your site health is okay and the reason for your traffic drop wasn’t technical SEO.

If, however, the tool uncovers an issue with crawlability, you should look to address it. 

Ultimately, technical site health is just one aspect that could be the issue. Jeremy Moser explains how it’s often a combination of factors.

There is almost never one point of failure. Don’t be quick to point the finger at a single element of your strategy. It’s almost always a combination of factors like content quality, freshness, accuracy, link quality and freshness, and more – some that are out of your control, like increased number of sites competing for your terms – by simple math, your **** of sustaining rankings goes down, no matter how good your content and website are.

Jeremy Moser, CEO of uSERP

3. Identify Areas for Improvement 

After your initial site audit, you should know if your pages that were most impacted have technical issues or not. If they’re technically clean, then you can start to consider how your content quality might be falling short. 

Content Quality

This will require you to self-assess your content to see how it can be improved. Go through the list of content and quality questions Google recommends. 

For every question, you have an opportunity to improve your page. 

Look for ways to provide more original information, research, or reporting. Provide a more comprehensive description of the topic, if possible. And of course, triple check to remove any factual errors or stylistic issues.

Competitor Analysis

Not sure how to improve your content quality? You can look at what your top competitors are doing right.

After all, one of Google’s quality questions listed is “Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?” 

To investigate this, you’ll need to go through your target keywords and look at the SERPs to see who’s ranking at the top. Then you can compare their content to yours to understand why they might be outranking you.

To find your competitor’s recent success, use the Organic Research Position Changes report.

This report lets you identify the top pages that saw a positive change over a select time period, meaning you can dive into the pages that were rewarded with higher rankings during the Google update. 

Simply enter your competitor’s domain into the search bar to analyze the pages that saw the most movement in SEO positions.

The Top Page Changes widget shows the pages that immediately saw either big drops or gains. 

View the full table and sort by improved traffic differential to find your competitor’s pages that won the best higher rankings over this time period.

Now, you can see their pages that were rewarded during the given time period.

Follow the links to review their content and compare their web pages to yours. Look to understand what their page offers people that your doesn’t. 

Is it more comprehensive, with more original information, reporting, research, or analysis?

My approach always centers on thematically analyzing the content that got rewarded via the update. What I like to do is look for “quality patterns” across a variety of keywords within the same “vertical” or topic to see what Google was looking for. I don’t mean this in the sense of surface-level characteristics like “intent” or whatnot. You really want to try to dig in and analyze the approach the newly ranking content took. 
For example, one pattern I saw with sites on numerous occasions is that they took what I term a “situational” approach to content. Meaning, the page dispensed advice and then took up what happened if the advice didn’t work or things of that nature – really looking at the content from the context of the user. If you can identify these patterns, it’s like a peak into Google’s brain so to speak.
That said, I always quote Glenn Gabe when it comes to these things and say to “throw the kitchen sink at it” because quality (or lack thereof) is usually not just “one” thing.

Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO branding at Wix

While analyzing their successful content, make notes about the differences between their winning pages and your losing pages.

Then, plan to improve your content accordingly. 

Backlinks

Another SEO aspect to check at this stage is your backlink profile. You can assess backlinks in two ways here: benchmarking against your competitors, and checking for link spam.

To benchmark your backlink strength for a specific keyword, use Keyword Overview and scroll down to the SERP analysis. From here you’ll see how many links (plus Authority Score) are pointing to your competitors for this keyword.

For a more thorough benchmarking, you can use Backlink Gap. This will compare your site side by side with up to four competitors. If you’ve seen your rankings drop while competitors stay strong, it could be because they have significantly more high-quality backlinks than you.

Here’s an example of a comparison where we can see the backlink profiles of five running shoe brands side by side.

You can run a Backlink Gap for your own site and your close competitors to find prospects to build new links to your site and gain some ground in this aspect.

If your site was impacted by a Google update that focused on link spam, then this process could help you bounce back. 

For investigating link spam in your current backlink profile, the Backlink Audit tool is invaluable. It helps you clean up your website by identifying potentially harmful links that might be signaling link spam to Google.

Once Backlink Audit is configured, the tool will scan your entire backlink profile, identifying and categorizing links based on their health and relevance. 

You can review these insights to pinpoint detrimental or low-quality links that might be impacting your site negatively. 

While Google is generally good at recognizing negative SEO attacks, if you’ve built any spammy links yourself, you’ll want to address those links by considering a disavow.

After taking care of any harmful links, you can plan on acquiring new, high-quality backlinks to strengthen your SEO authority. 

Focus on authority.Authority is a core update “get out of jail free” card. Both topical (content) authority and site (backlinks + brand) authority.
If you look at the dozens to hundreds of suggestions Google makes on how to do things properly, the largest sites in the world violate many of them, yet through every core update, they still rank well. Why? Authority.
People find NerdWallet to be an authority, they seek the site out on SERPs, and they click, even if it takes 3 more seconds to load than their competition. That’s authority.

Jeremy Moser, CEO of uSERP

Need ideas? Check out our list of recommended link building strategies. Or run a Backlink Gap analysis to find specific websites that link to your competitors, but not you. 

4. Implement Changes and Re-optimize 

Now that you’ve pinpointed where improvements are needed, it’s time to make those targeted adjustments. 

By now, you should have a list of technical issues with your site, notes on what your competitor’s content does better than yours, and a list of potentially harmful links going to your site.

This phase will involve:

• Refreshing or completely rewriting content to reflect current standards better 
• Tackling any technical issues revealed during the audit
• Ramping up your link building strategy

Content Improvement

To improve your content, review it with the list of quality questions and notes from your competitor’s successful content. 

Make sure your page provides substantial value compared to the other search results and offers original information, research, or analysis.

To make sure your content is as original and comprehensive as possible, you can incorporate the SEO Writing Assistant. 

This tool enables writers to assess the SEO strength and originality of their content in real time. 

Additionally, it evaluates the readability of the text, making it easier to ensure your content is user-friendly. 

You can integrate it as an extension in Google Docs, a plugin for WordPress, or an add-on for Microsoft Word.

Technical Issues

With any technical issues in your audit, the tool will have instructions on why and how to fix it. Review the list in the Issues tab and focus on the top errors first. 

Backlinks

As mentioned, the Backlink Gap can provide you with a list of prospects to build new and relevant links to your site. 

As you identify domains where you’d like to build a link, you can plan an outreach strategy to reach out and offer a reason for them to link to your site.

With all of these steps you could take, you should take a slow approach. Test making changes to a few pages at a time and assess the impact before scaling your efforts on a wider scale. 

As you make changes, you can ask Google to recrawl your URLs through GSC.

This way, you won’t waste a ton of time and money updating your site in ways that don’t make an impact.

To track any improvements to your SEO rankings, you can set up a tracking campaign.

5. Track the Impact of Your Efforts 

While you can track your organic traffic recovery with Google Search Console, you can keep a closer eye on specific keyword rankings using Position Tracking. 

This tool is your partner in navigating the daily fluctuation of search rankings. It monitors shifts in keyword positions, helping you gauge the success of your SEO recovery efforts in real-time.

To set up Position Tracking, enter your parameters and the target keywords you wish to track. 

Go back to your list of top queries exported from Google Search Console and upload that list when configuring the tool.

This tool will then deliver daily updates on your keyword rankings, enabling you to follow the daily progress of your recovery efforts. 

Traffic recovery after a Google update is never easy–you can use all the help you can get. 

Here’s another round of tools that could aid in your recovery efforts from other angles:

On Page SEO Checker

When you’re looking for ways to improve your content post-update, try the On Page SEO Checker. This tool offers customized suggestions to elevate your content quality, sharpen your technical SEO, and enhance your backlink profile. 

This tool will prioritize the pages to revise and then give you a list of actionable ideas so you can get started right away. You’ll see specific suggestions about if you should focus on readability, adding video content, improving your title, and more. 

Keyword Gap for Competitive Analysis

Keyword Gap is designed to directly compare your keyword strategy and your competitors by identifying the keywords for which your competitors rank, but you do not. After your traffic takes a hit, you can run this gap analysis to see where your competitors are still ranking.

To use Keyword Gap, enter your and your competitors’ domains. The tool will display a comparison of the keywords for which each domain ranks, along with a table detailing various keyword opportunities.

Analyze the overlap and top opportunities to pinpoint where you can focus your next SEO efforts.

This helps you discover opportunities to win back some of the lost SEO traffic, as long as you can provide something better than your competitors. expand your keyword portfolio and enhance your SEO efforts.

SERP Gap Analyzer for Pinpointing Your Best SEO Options 

The SERP Gap Analyzer takes competitive analysis a step further by comparing your website’s performance in the SERPs against that of your competitors. It identifies areas where top results are weak, such as low authority, word count, page speed, and more.

To use the SERP Gap Analyzer, enter a seed topic and domain. The tool will then scan Google SERPs related to your topic to identify under-optimized pages and easier-to-rank opportunities for your site.

My Reports to Present to Coworkers and Clients 

Ready to share your findings? Use My Reports to compile and present recovery data to stakeholders or clients. 

This tool streamlines the creation of tailored reports, enabling you to track and communicate recovery progress. It makes updating strategies based on the latest data straightforward, ensuring all stakeholders are well-informed about the current SEO landscape.

To use My Reports, select the data points you want to track, such as traffic, rankings, and key performance indicators, and then customize the report’s layout and elements to meet your audience’s needs.

Developing a Resilient SEO Strategy for Future Updates

Developing a resilient SEO strategy is more than just recovery; it’s about staying one step ahead. The key is adaptability and a commitment to continuous learning. 

Embrace the fluctuating nature of Google updates as opportunities to refine and improve your strategy. 

Establish a routine of monitoring your SEO performance and adjusting tactics based on new insights and industry standards. This proactive approach will help you maintain high rankings and adapt swiftly to future algorithm updates.