How to Recover Website Rankings After a Google Spam Update

A sudden traffic drop may be stressful if your website was performing consistently in Google Search. If your website’s rankings in Google Search dropped sharply after a Google Spam Update, you might be asking yourself what happened and how to fix it.

Google periodically enhances its search algorithms to detect and devalue spam and rate content that appears spammy lower in the SERPs. Websites that engage in spammy SEO practices, publish spam content at scale, or violate Google’s spam policies get negatively affected by such algorithm updates, resulting in their traffic loss. However, not every drop in your site’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is necessarily due to a spam algorithm update.

In this article, you will learn how to recover website rankings after Google Spam Update, what SEO issues to prioritize while troubleshooting the traffic drop, and when to consider hiring an experienced SEO agency to help you resolve the issues.

What Is a Google Spam Update?

A Google Spam Update is a change to Google’s automated systems for detecting and reducing search spam. These systems aim to prevent manipulative practices from gaining visibility in search results.

Google’s spam policies identify several practices that can violate its guidelines, including:

• Scaled content abuse refers to content that is created on a scale and with a primary purpose of manipulating relevance rather than providing value to users.
• Link spam is created by artificially inflated sets of links aimed primarily at manipulation of relevance.
• Cloaking involves serving different content to a search engine and to a user in order to manipulate the search results.
• Doorway abuse involves doorway pages that are targeted at similar queries but have little unique value.
• Expired domain abuse refers to using an expired domain primarily for manipulation purposes with content that provides little value to the audience.
• Site reputation abuse involves publishing third party content on a host site and taking advantage of the host’s signals in ways that are beyond the control of the publisher according to Google’s policy.

A drop in the ranking does not necessarily mean that the site violated one of these policies. The drop in visibility in search results may be due to technical, content, competitive, or other Google-related reasons.

How to Recover Website Rankings After a Google Spam Update

Recovering from a drop in rankings usually takes more than one step. To get your page back to the top, avoid haphazard trial-and-error SEO. Start with a close examination of the affected posts to determine why they’ve dropped in the first place.

1. Confirm Whether the Google Spam Update Affected Your Website

Before making any adjustments to your content or backlink profile, make sure that the drop didn’t coincide with one of Google’s spam updates.

To do that, head over to Google Search Console and check the Performance report.

Compare the 28 days before and after the drop period. If possible, also compare the data from the same period last year (to factor in seasonality).

Check the following metrics:

• Clicks: Did the number of users who arrived at your website via Google Search decrease?
• Impressions: Is your website less visible in the search engine results pages?
• Average position: Did your keywords stop being on the first pages of Google?
• CTR: Are users not clicking through your links as frequently as before?

After checking these metrics go to the Pages report and the Queries report and find out which pages and keywords started losing traffic.

2. Check Google Search Console for Manual Actions

A manual action differs from an algorithmic change in rankings.

Google may take manual action against a website if they believe that it violates their policies on spam. You can view a list of manual actions taken by Google in your Search Console.

If a manual action appears:

• Open Google Search Console.
• Select your website property.
• Navigate to the Manual Actions report.
• Read the issue description carefully.
• Identify the affected pages or sections.
• Correct the violations before requesting a review.

Common examples of this are unnatural links, user generated spam, and other policy violations.

A report of no manual action does not mean that your site is completely free of spam issues. Algorithmic ranking changes typically do not result in manual actions being issued.

This helps you understand how to proceed if you believe there has been a problem, instead of resubmitting a reconsideration request that might not be necessary.

3. Audit Your Website Content for Quality and Spam Risks

Content quality plays a vital role in any sustainable SEO strategy. Check the articles that lost traffic and ensure that they actually answer the questions users were interested in.

Watch out for signs of unhelpful content, such as

• redundant texts with no added value,
• vast quantities of automatically generated content,
• articles created solely for keyword variety,
• copied or slightly modified texts from other websites,
• location pages with almost identical content and no specific information,
• untrue or misleading texts

To improve your content:

• Answer the main search query early in the article.
• Include practical examples, original observations, or relevant experience.
• Remove unnecessary repetition and unsupported claims.
• Update outdated information.
• Combine overlapping articles when appropriate.
• Improve or remove pages that provide little value, based on a careful page-level assessment.

4. Review Your Backlink Profile for Link Spam

Backlinks can help Google to understand relationships between websites, but links created primarily to manipulate rankings can violate Google’s spam policies.

Review your backlink profile if your website has participated in link schemes, purchased ranking focused links or has suffered any kind of suspicious link building activity.

• Use a reliable backlink analysis tool to investigate:
• Unnatural links from unrelated websites.
• Paid links intended to pass ranking credit.
• Large scale reciprocal linking schemes.
• Automated link building patterns.
• Use of too many exact match anchor texts on links built as part of manipulative campaigns.

Focus on identifying actual manipulative practices instead of jumping to conclusions about every unfamiliar link as spam.

5. Improve Local Landing Pages and Remove Doorway Abuse Risks

Many companies operate throughout an area and will generate landing pages for customers in these regions.

However, the creation of many nearly identical pages that target different locations that traffic towards the same destination can generate doorway abuse risks.

Review your location pages and ask:

• Does each page provide useful information specific to that location?
• Are the services genuinely available in the area?
• Does the page include relevant project examples, service details, or customer information?
• Is the content meaningfully different where the customer needs differ?
• Can visitors easily contact the business or take the next step?

6. Fix Technical SEO Issues That May Affect Rankings

A Google spam update may occur at the same time as technical issues that independently lower the visibility of organic results. Check the technical health of your website before jumping to the conclusion that spam is the culprit.

Look out for:

• Important pages that have been blocked by robots.txt
• Wrong no-index directives
• Unexpected canonical tags pointing to other URLs
• Broken internal links and redirect chains
• Server errors and unavailable pages.
• Mobile usability and page experience problems.
• Sitemap errors and indexing changes.

Use Google Search Console’s Page Indexing report and URL Inspection tool to examine the impacted URLs.

7. Strengthen E-E-A-T and Demonstrate Real Expertise

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It represents a group of factors from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, but it is not a single element that directly impacts the ranking.

Enhancing them should improve your contents’ quality, which will positively affect its position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The following are some of the practical ways to do it:

• Include correct information about the author of the work.
• Indicate his qualifications as an expert in the field.
• Make sure that all statements are supported by factual information.
• Provide accurate data for all parameters that describe a company.
• Offer unique examples of cases studied.
• Give your contact information and numbers clearly and openly.
• Update the information if changes occur or new data appears.

8. Monitor Recovery and Measure Progress

After fixing the issues, instead of watching your rankings plummet, keep an eye on your site.

Google’s index needs to refresh for all the changes to take effect in the eyes of Google, which could be a day or two. The period can be different based on the problems you had and the systems Google uses to review and recrawl the site.

Google Search Console can help you track:

• Organic clicks and impressions.
• Average keyword positions.
• Performance of previously affected URLs.
• Indexing status of important pages.
• Changes in the queries generating traffic.

Keep a record of the changes you make, including dates and affected URLs. This helps you understand which improvements correspond with subsequent performance changes.

How Can Professional SEO Services Help With Google Spam Update Recovery?

Rebuilding a fallen ranking after a substantial drop is not an easy task, especially when the reasons for it are not clear and the volume of affected URLs is relatively large.

A competent SEO company will take care of analyzing the specifics of your ranking decline, detect possible violations of SEO policies, and select the most relevant optimization techniques based on the available facts.

Thus, professional SEO services may include:

• Google Search Console performance analysis.
• Technical SEO audits and indexing checks.
• Content quality and spam-policy reviews.
• Backlink profile analysis.
• Local landing page audits.
• Content improvement and consolidation.
• Ongoing ranking and traffic monitoring.

Before you start working with an SEO provider, ask them about how they diagnose the issue, measure results, and report on the work they do.

Conclusion: Take the Right Steps Toward SEO Recovery

How SEOs Can Recover Website Rankings After Google Spam Update

The main priority when recovering from a Google spam update is defining the cause of the issue. The user should examine Google Search Console for manual actions, analyze the quality of content, check acquired backlinks, and resolve existing technical errors.

It is better to avoid using insignificant methods and multiple on-page changes. SEOs should concentrate on high-quality content creation, proper optimization, and reliability of information. In addition, it is critical to constantly monitor statistics and web presence.

If you need to find out the reason for a drop in the rating of your resource, contact the professionals holding expertise in the sphere. They will investigate the current state of affairs, offer solutions, and address all issues to maintain an excellent search engine position.

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