The worst thing that could happen, happened, and you’re now stuck scratching your head, thinking what you need to do to fix the traffic drop after a Google update. Knowing how to recover from a Google core update can be the make-or-break for your business.
In this guide at Socio Greek, we’ll break down what you need to do after your website has been hit by a Google core update.
What is a Google Core Update?
Google keeps updating its algorithm to ensure it’s able to provide relevant and good search results. Google claims to update its algorithms almost every day. However, sometimes there are some major changes to the algorithm, and those are called “core updates.”
The most recent Google Core Update came out in June 2025. If your website has also been hit by a core update and traffic and ranking are failing, there are a couple of things you can do.
First thing you need to understand is to take a look at the core update and what’s the goal. Here’s what Google has to say about their core updates:
“Several times a year, we make significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems. We refer to these as core updates…
They’re designed to ensure that overall, we’re delivering on our mission to present helpful and reliable content to searchers.”
If you carefully analyze that statement, you’d understand why a website may be demoted in the search rankings. Either the website has issues with it’s ‘helpfulness’ or the issue is with the ‘reliability.’
So, how do you fix traffic drop after Google update? Let’s hear it from Google itself about fixing the issue.
How to Recover from Google Core Update - Google’s Statement
Google has never been crystal clear about how to recover traffic after Google core update. For a long time, Google original statement for websites hit with core update was “pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix.”
Fortunately, that statement changed after May 2022:
“We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things.”
And in March 2024, the advice became even more specific:
“For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page.”
So, Google suggests that there are some things users can try to fix if websites have been hit with a core update.
So, let’s talk about the things you can do to recover traffic after your website has been hit by a core update.
Google Core Update Recovery Tips
Here we have mentioned the tips of Google Core update recovery, which you can implement to get your website traffic out of the core update.
Stay Calm and Analyze the Situation
This is the hardest thing to do after you have been hit by a core update. If you’ve seen a major dip in your site traffic, it makes sense that you’d start to panic. But the key is not to panic and make a bunch of changes to counteract the dip. While your intention is to fix the issue, you could end up doing some irreversible damage.
Also, Google core updates take 3-4 weeks to completely roll out. Doing Google core updates, websites go through a lot of ups and downs. Chances are the dip you’re seeing is just temporary.
If you’re lucky you may see most of your traffic come back once the update has finished rolling out. Wait till the core update rollout is complete and you know for sure that your website has been hit by a core update.
Analyze the Data
Once you’re sure that your website, in fact, was hit by the Google core update, it’s time to dig into the data.
You need to analyze a couple of things:
- Which pages lost rankings?
- Are there patterns in the keywords affected?
- Are there any major traffic drops from particular queries or regions?
Check Google Search Console and Google Analytics to understand the dips in data. Also take a look at your competitor’s rankings if they’ve managed to climb up the rankings while you’ve falled down.
Digging deep into the data can make everything clearer for you.
Improve Helpfulness in Your Content
Now that you have analyzed which pages have lost their rankings, it’s time to fix them. Remember Google’s signal that pages that lose their ranking may have issues with helpfulness or reliability.
So the obvious next step is to improve the helpfulness in your content. Google now considers your content to be unhelpful and unreliable for user’s queries. How do you solve that? By making your content more helpful.
Ensure Pages are Up-to-Date
If you’re targeting information-intent queries to drive traffic to your website, then you need to make sure that your content is fresh and up-to-date. Google even has an algorithm that deals with this particular problem of out-of-date content.
Most SEOs misunderstand the requirement of content freshness with “I need to keep adding new blogs to my site,” however, that’s not the case. You don’t have to publish 6-7 blogs every week just to stay visible.
The problem is that your existing content (that has now been hit with an update) isn’t fresh and relevant enough. Go through all the impacted pages one by one and correct any wrong information or update out-of-date information.
One more mistake that most SEO experts do while updating their pages is that they make minimal changes to trick Google. However, algorithms are smarter than that. Unless and until there’s some valuable new information on the page, Google won’t mark the content as updated.
Improve Reliability
Another reason why your content is being pushed down is how much trust your content has. There are a number of things Google checks whether your content is a credible source of information or not.
- Improving on-page trust
Google is pretty clear on what it considers trustworthy content. You can check out the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines document. The document covers a range of ‘Expereince, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness’ benchmarks that Google uses to determine whether your content is an authority on a topic or not.
- Improving off-page trust
Once you’ve fixed everything from the on-page list, look to improve off-page trust. Google needs outside signals to determine whether your content can be trusted or not.
- Leverage brand mentions
Another way you can make your site and your content feel reliable is by seeking out mentions of your brand on other sites. Make sure that you write content that can be trusted
Conclusion
Recovering from a Google Core Update isn’t about doing quick fixes and hoping everything will return to normal. There are multiple underlying problems that can be the root cause of why your website has been hit with an update. Follow the tips we’ve mentioned above and Fix traffic drop after Google update.
