Ch. 15: My Core Update Triage (Before You Change Anything)

Ch. 15: My Core Update Triage (Before You Change Anything)

March update, my recipe-adjacent site lost 44% of traffic overnight. The instinct is to start editing in a panic. I forced myself through a triage first.

— Waited 2 full weeks — updates wobble, and half my "losses" partially recovered on their own
— Exported losing URLs from GSC, sorted by clicks lost. 70% of the damage came from 9 pages
— Read those 9 honestly: 6 were thin affiliate pages I'd phoned in. Guilty
— Checked who replaced me in the SERP — all had original testing, photos, author bios. I had none
— Made a fix list, touched ONE page first as a test before mass-editing

That test page recovered in 6 weeks. I rolled the playbook to the other 8 over two months. Traffic came back to 85%.

Lesson banked: a core update is a code review of your weakest pages. Read the review before you rewrite.