What should you do if Google has slashed traffic to your sites and you don’t want to go back to eating Mivina instant noodles? Below, I’ll share a recipe that has been working for me for years.
Every now and then, Google slashes my sites and my colleagues’ sites. On those days, 30% to 50% of traffic is lost. It’s painful, unpleasant, and sad, but life goes on. And we haven’t found anything better than simply redirecting sites to new domains. You’d think this shouldn’t work—after all, Google is smart (if the old content is garbage, why would it be any better on a new site?), and so on. But no. A simple 301 redirect still works just fine.
I’ve encountered two scenarios for traffic drops:
1. Google banned your site. 0 pages in the index. In this case, you can launch the exact same site on a different, higher-authority domain (while the old site keeps running). Back in 2018, I had a site with around 40k daily visits. Google wiped it out to 0, but there was still traffic from Yandex and Bing—about 3–5k per day total. Ultimately, I created a new site with the same content. After a year, traffic on the new site fully recovered. As a bonus, I ended up with another site that is no longer afraid of Google updates.
2. Google penalized your site. The index isn’t 0 pages, but traffic dropped. In this scenario, I set up a 301 redirect from the affected site to a new one. That’s exactly what happened during the June spam update. Less than half a year has passed, and this is the situation across many sites. To increase the chances of traffic returning, I’d recommend looking for a higher-authority expired domain than the previous one.
If your site’s structure includes subdomains, you can redirect those instead. Yes, Google sometimes selectively hits subdomains. That’s why redirecting subdomains works as well. Here is an example of this approach.
I’ll admit this method doesn’t work 100% of the time or in every case. But overall, it’s inexpensive (costs only cover a new domain) and effective for my workflow (I’m certainly not going to rewrite text on doorway pages).
What do you do with your hit sites?