A decline in organic traffic is a serious issue for all websites, whether owned by individuals or companies. One of the most discussed topics in SEO is the drastic drop in organic traffic that occurs when Google releases an algorithm update, negatively impacting certain websites. Health websites, in particular, require special handling as they fall under the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category. The initial algorithm update for health-related sites was known as the Medic Update.
Are Health Websites Affected by Google Algorithm Updates?
Health websites often experience organic traffic drops and keyword volatility whenever Google updates its algorithm. This decline does not only affect small blogs but also well-established health websites with millions of monthly visitors. If you are a website owner, digital marketing staff, or an agency managing a health website, you need to anticipate these changes by optimizing both on-page and off-page SEO to maintain peak performance.
What Should You Do If Your Organic Traffic Drops?
If your health website suddenly experiences a nearly 50% drop in traffic compared to its monthly average, coinciding with a Google algorithm update, a thorough analysis is necessary to resolve the issue. Here’s what you need to do to recover your website and restore its performance:
- Monitor Google Search Status – Check for algorithm updates at Google Search Status or use various SEO tools to track updates.
- Conduct a Website Audit – Use Google Search Console or free audit tools like Ahrefs (discussed in our article here). Ensure your website scores above 80.
- Eliminate Internal Duplicate Content – Use Siteliner (link) to identify and remove duplicate content.
- Audit Content Quality – Use plagiarism checkers or premium tools like Copyscape to analyze content. Prioritize auditing pages with significant traffic declines.
- Enhance Content Authority and Expertise – Include expert profiles (e.g., doctors) in every published article and link their LinkedIn profiles. Learn more about E-EAT in our article here.
- Improve Website Speed – Optimize both mobile and desktop performance. Check Core Web Vitals for volatility, indicated by fluctuating green and red lines.
- Enable Comments – Health websites should encourage user interaction. However, ensure proper moderation of user-generated content.
- Analyze Backlink Quality and Quantity – Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush (Ahrefs is more sensitive to spam backlinks). A sudden spike in referring domains may indicate spam backlinks. Spam backlink sites often have a high DR but zero organic traffic and keywords. Also, check if multiple referring domains share the same IP class.
- Increase Backlink Authority – Use high-quality backlinks such as media backlinks (link).
- Disavow Toxic Backlinks – (We will discuss the proper disavow process in a future article.) From our experience, if your website already has strong authority backlinks, low-quality backlinks may not need disavowing.
To implement steps 1–10 effectively, you must have more than just basic SEO knowledge. Professional SEO intervention may be required to resolve these issues and restore your health website’s performance. Even if you execute all steps correctly, recovery is not instant. The recovery process can take between 3–6 months to regain optimal performance.
