Introduction:

The client site was one that was hit hard in Google’s core algorithm update on 7th March 2018, losing rankings, traffic, and rich snippets in SERPs.

Objective:

Recover from Google’s quality update and regain rankings and traffic.

Challenge:

An algorithm update no one knew how to deal with.

Google representatives confirmed that they released a core ranking algorithm update over the weekend in March 2018. Updates like this occur several times a year, but Google had no specific recommendations on what webmasters should fix if they were hit by this update.

The update was a broad update that was focused on quality and was primarily about demoting sites that lacked good E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust). We worked with the client to improve their E-A-T and it helped.

Here is the screenshot from SEMRush: 

Solution:

Here’s what we did to fix the drop.

First, we enhanced E-A-T by updating the key pages on the site with high-quality content that reflected expertise. And then adopted an outreach strategy to earn links from well-known sites. That’s really important from an E-A-T perspective since Google largely looks at links from well-known sites.

However, the site noticed a drop again during Google’s Search Quality algorithm update in August of the same year. But we knew that Google in the long-run rewards sites focusing on quality and providing a meaningful user experience – because we made changes in how we produced content for the client in combination with improving technical SEO and enhancing content quality.

With these changes in place, we now have a consistent flow of quality traffic to the client’s site as illustrated in the screenshot above.

As for the Rich Snippets, there’s a quality threshold to them as well. After we started working on improving quality for the site after the drop from March 2018, we gained the star ratings back with the Search Quality Update in August.

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