After the release on doorway sites, I started gathering information and reviewing my own sites.
Turns out I found a site (in the screenshot) whose index dropped to 10 pages and then bounced back to 3,000 pages. The result was a sharp traffic surge and the penalty being lifted.
In Google Search Console, traffic recovered within a few days.
What was done:
- removed affiliate links
- deleted 4,260 pages with zero traffic. 3,200 pages remained on the site. Google’s index currently shows 2,890—pretty close to what’s needed.
People with white-hat sites face the exact same indexing and penalty issues.
Check your index and see if there are any discrepancies.
You might need to remove pages that get no traffic.
I have a US-targeted white-hat site that I invested about $5,000 in, and it’s sitting under the same filter as a doorway site. A redirect doesn’t help—the penalty simply transfers to the new domain.
I was shown a site that went from 100k unique monthly visitors down to almost zero traffic.
Since July, I’ve launched a series of experiments specifically testing thin content as the root cause of the filter.