Posting the full story since I found these threads useful when I was panicking.
Site: outdoor cooking, around 300 articles, affiliate plus some display ads. March update took us from ~9k to ~4k daily clicks.
What I did between April and August:
– deleted or merged 70 posts that were basically rewrites of manufacturer specs
– added real testing notes and photos to the top 40 money pages (bought or borrowed the gear)
– cut ad units per page from 7 to 4
– removed “best X under $Y” pages where I hadn’t used most of the products
– rewrote the about page to say who actually does the testing
August update: back to ~7.5k. Not a full recovery but the biggest pages came back.
I can’t say which item did it, and I know correlation isn’t proof. But nothing moved at all until the update rolled out, which matches what everyone says.
If you’re in a similar spot, happy to answer questions. And if you recovered with a different mix, what was it?
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