Pruning Case Study

Earlier this year, someone asked me to help them recover their site after its traffic “randomly” just went to zero.

I could tell something was wrong, and at the time, there had just been the Helpful Content & Spam updates, so I knew for sure they got hit.

I checked their posts, and saw a large fluctuation of content added to the site around that time too, just hundreds of posts, many of which had still not even been indexed by Google.

I realized that they had not only spammed, but posted unhelpful content, since much of the new content had little/nothing to do with their old, ranked posts.

Here’s what I did (for SERP Insider eyes only)..