Proof Entry
Aged Domain Traffic Recovery After Content Refresh
A 5-year-old domain in the health niche recovered 62% of lost organic traffic within 90 days by refreshing 40 outdated articles with updated information, improved internal linking, and enhanced E-E-A-T signals.
This proof entry documents the measurable recovery of organic traffic on an aged health domain that had experienced a significant decline following a Google core update.
The domain had approximately 200 indexed pages, with 40 identified as having outdated medical information, broken outbound links, and thin content sections. A systematic content refresh was executed over a 6-week period.
Each refreshed article received updated statistics, new expert citations, improved internal linking to related content clusters, and expanded sections addressing user intent gaps identified through Search Console query analysis.
Evidence
- Organic clicks recovered: 62% within 90 days - Average position improved: from 18.4 to 11.2 for target keywords - Crawl rate increase: 35%, measured by server logs
Methodology
40 articles were selected based on year-over-year traffic decline exceeding 30%. Each article was audited for content freshness, link integrity, and E-E-A-T signals. Refreshes were published in batches of 8 per week over 5 weeks. A control group of 20 non-refreshed articles was tracked for comparison.
Outcome
The refreshed articles outperformed the control group by 4.2x in traffic recovery. 28 of 40 refreshed articles returned to page 1 for their primary keyword. The domain's overall domain authority (as estimated by Ahrefs) increased by 3 points during the observation period.
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