Link Insertions + Guest Posts · 6 months
Recovering 60% of traffic lost to a core update
A homeware retailer lost roughly half its organic traffic across two core updates and had spent four months adding content that made the problem worse.
Fielding & CoLink Insertions + Guest Posts6 months
- +60%
- Of lost traffic recovered
- −41%
- Indexed pages
- 128
- Pages consolidated
- +22%
- Revenue from organic
The challenge
Two consecutive core updates took organic sessions from 210,000 to 104,000 a month. The instinctive response had been to publish more, which added 300 thin pages to a site that was already struggling with a bloated index. Category pages were competing with each other on nearly every commercial term.
What we did
- 1
Audited all 1,400 indexed pages and scored each on traffic, conversions and topical overlap with its neighbours.
- 2
Consolidated 128 competing pages into 34 stronger ones, with redirects mapped so equity was preserved rather than dropped.
- 3
Rewrote the surviving category pages against current search intent, which had shifted noticeably toward comparison and buying guidance.
- 4
Built links only to the consolidated pages, deliberately keeping volume low while the site's index settled.
The outcome
Recovery began at month three and levelled off at month six with roughly 60% of the lost traffic restored. The index shrank by 41% while revenue from organic rose 22% against the pre-recovery baseline — fewer pages, each doing considerably more work.
“The hardest part was being told to delete things. It was the opposite of what we had been doing, and it was the thing that worked.”
What would this look like for your site?
We'll run the same competitor analysis on your domain and tell you honestly what's achievable, and roughly how long it should take.