For those of you who’ve been hit hard by Google updates (especially those who lost about 50% of your traffic), what did you do afterward? Did your traffic ever recover?
I’ve been hit for the first time, and I’m feeling like all my hard work over the past months has been for nothing. This spring, I focused on improving page speed, publishing consistently, updating old posts, and generally following Google’s guidelines for quality content. Things were improving until the August update hit… and now I’m crushed. Traffic had been picking up slightly last week, but yesterday was one of my worst days in a long time.
Right now, I’m thinking of taking a break for a month and then just going back to writing occasionally for fun…without the stress or expectation of turning this into a full-time job. It all feels pointless and exhausting right now.
Has anyone experienced a recovery after being hit this badly? What did you do to get back on track? Or should I just accept that this might be a permanent change?
The blogging world is more competitive than ever. To survive, we need to keep our reputation, authority, and trust intact. I see you’re working on updating old content, optimizing keywords, and improving technical SEO, which is great.
But…
What about your current users, their experience, relationships, and your subscriber base? Have you ever focused on these areas or worked to maintain them before? If not, you’re in a risky zone. Even with the rise of AI, Google still updates its algorithm to reward human-generated content. These frequent changes can harm many blogs and websites.
If you look closely, most sites (about 95%) lack strong authority and credibility, and those that do often have it in a limited area.
Make sure to balance content creation, user experience, and SEO equally.
If my traffic dropped by more than 70%, I’d probably quit. I went from 5 million visitors to just 30k, tried everything to fix it, but nothing worked…even with ten years of SEO experience.
On the other hand, I’ve been working on a client’s site since November 2023, and their traffic has recovered with every Google update.
I try to look at the metrics weekly or monthly, not everyday. I haven’t put in much work after the update hit me … I’m considering working on it again and revisiting my site layout/old posts.
I listen to several blogging podcasts, and it sounds like you’re following the same advice they give and that others have tried. Some have seen recovery, but it seems random—maybe it’s the niche, or maybe it’s just luck. One suggestion I’ve heard a lot is to focus on getting traffic from social media to make up for the loss, while hoping Google sorts things out over time.