Recovering a 130,000-page medical platform after a multi-update drop

Results

Monthly average = 16 months total ÷ 16. Real months vary; this is arithmetic, not a trend line.

The situation

A large medical (YMYL) health platform of roughly 130,000 pages had lost visibility across several Google updates.

In a Your-Money-or-Your-Life niche, quality and trust signals are judged more strictly, so the recovery had to address the whole site rather than a handful of pages.

What I did

1. 01

   Diagnosed the drop by update

   Traced the losses to specific Google core and spam updates instead of treating the decline as one event.

2. 02

   Isolated scaled-content risk

   Identified about 20,000 duplicate pages that created scaled-content-abuse risk.

3. 03

   Flagged infrastructure failures

   Surfaced host and crawl-budget failures that limited how much of the site Google could process.

4. 04

   Built the recovery plan

   Action items across all pages, recovery of previously high-value URLs, and content gap and expansion analysis.

5. 05

   Restructured the taxonomy

   Moved to a blog-to-category taxonomy and built a Pregnancy Questions Center as a structured topic hub.

6. 06

   Audited rendering and prepared for AI search

   Ran Screaming Frog, Googlebot rendering, and Search Console audits, and prepared llms.txt for AI crawlers.

Disciplines involved