Recovering from a Top Stories penalty and implementing content quality initiatives to drive sustainable traffic growth.
The client came to me after falling out of Top Stories—and also after failing to figure it out on their own or find an agency that could solve the issue.
A solution was needed, and fast. The stakes couldn't have been higher for a news publication.
I took a methodical three-phase approach to diagnose and solve the issue:
First, I sought to rule out a technical issue. During this audit, I uncovered some image and redirect issues and put in dev tickets to resolve them.
I found tens of thousands of pages that were almost a decade old and extremely thin. In their haste to "be first," they had built up pages that were only about one paragraph long. We removed pages not producing rankings, traffic, or authority.
I wanted to ensure that if we were removing poor content, we were producing the best possible content moving forward. I provided simple but effective editorial guidelines for their authors.
After solving these issues, the site returned to Top Stories overnight. We tested a number of athlete and team-based queries and consistently saw the site featured in this section of Google's search results.
After feeling confident the issue was solved, I provided the team additional guidance and best practices to future-proof the site. While volatility has certainly been part of the story since then (and for many news sites), their baseline traffic is currently holding very strong.
The client had tried to solve this on their own and couldn't find an agency that could fix it. Within weeks of working together, they were back in Top Stories and seeing significant traffic recovery.
Let's discuss how to recover from penalties and build sustainable traffic growth.
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