I’ve been managing a few SEO projects over the past few months—handling everything from technical to on-page and off-page. Things were looking good after Google’s core update in November, and traffic really picked up by the end of the month. But not long after, they dropped another core update and then the ‘Spam Update’ hit.
One of the sites I’ve been working on saw traffic nosedive by more than 50%. I knew small dips happen, but this felt different—way too big of a drop to ignore. So, I started digging into the site’s history back to 2019.
I looked at:
Backlinks
Blog content
Traffic patterns
Turns out, the problem was pretty clear.
Here’s what I found:
The client started SEO in 2022.
By the end of the year, they had about 13,000 monthly visitors and 25,000 backlinks.
When Google dropped the December ‘Spam Update,’ traffic dropped to around 9,000 visitors.
From Jan to Sept, it averaged around 8,500 visitors a month.
In October 2023, another ‘Spam Update’ knocked traffic down to 5,000.
The 2024 update hit the hardest—cutting traffic in half again.
After looking deeper, I realized spam backlinks were the biggest issue. The blog wasn’t updated super regularly, but that wasn’t what caused the drop. The previous agency built a bunch of bad links on random, irrelevant sites without the client even knowing.
Once I figured this out, I started disavowing the spammy links through Google Search Console. Slowly, traffic started climbing again.
The client was impressed, and honestly, I was too. It’s one of those things that really makes you appreciate the technical side of SEO.
I’m curious—has anyone else experienced something similar with these updates? If so, what steps did you take to recover?
25,000 backlinks is crazy. Glad Google’s cracking down on this stuff. Agencies love using shady tactics and it’s the clients that pay the price. Your breakdown makes total sense.
I run a couple of home service sites with only a few backlinks—and they’re all solid ones. The content is mostly AI-generated but edited by humans. After the update, one site dropped from #1 to #9.
Should I rewrite everything by hand or just tweak what’s there? How much AI content do you think is acceptable?
@Billy
If the content connects with users and answers their questions, I wouldn’t worry too much. A mix of AI and human input can work. Maybe check if something else caused the drop before scrapping the content entirely.
Imagine now that a small business like mine gets hit where everything is a one man show. I have felt a drop but I am no SEO expert, all I know is I have to use meta tags, proper file naming, place a good project description on the page, significant url name, and blog every week or so.
The hike is from when I started making serious SEO work on my website. I thought the drop in impressions is caused by the low season during the month of December.
I think it’s because of those bad and unavailable pages I have on my website. I have to clean them up maybe that will bring back the impressions.
