How long does core update recovery take?

Usually months, not weeks. Google reassesses sites gradually, and the clearest recoveries often show at the next core update after the improvements.

Should I delete old blog posts?

Only the ones that are thin, outdated and get no traffic or links. Improve or merge the rest. Redirect anything you remove that has links pointing to it.

Is AI-written content penalised?

Google says it judges helpfulness, not how content was produced. In practice, mass-produced pages with no first-hand experience are what tend to lose.

Core Update Recovery: Why E-E-A-T Is Your Best Defence

When a core update hits, most site owners rush to change things before they know what happened. The first step is diagnosis. The second is making your site obviously written by people who know the subject.

First: was it really the update?

Check these before blaming the algorithm:

Did you change URLs or rebuild the site recently? Missing 301 redirects cause drops that look exactly like an update. It's the most common cause of sudden traffic loss I see in technical SEO audits.
Search Console Pages report. Are pages “Not found (404)”, or “Crawled – currently not indexed”?
Manual actions and removals in Search Console.

If those are clean and the drop lines up with an announced update date, it's likely a quality reassessment. My Google algorithm update tracker lists every confirmed ranking update with its start and end dates, straight from Google's Search Status Dashboard, and the indexing checker rules out a technical block on any single URL.

What E-E-A-T means in practice

Experience: Show you've done it. Real cases, results, photos of your own work.
Expertise: Accurate detail that a beginner couldn't write.
Authoritativeness: Others reference you: reviews, mentions, links.
Trust: Consistent facts, a real author, real contact details, honest claims.

Recovery checklist

Clear author identity. Author bio, Person schema, a consistent name on every page.
Prune or merge thin pages. Pages with little unique value drag the whole site down.
Add proof. Replace generic claims (“we drive massive results”) with specific, verifiable numbers, like the ones in my case studies.
Rewrite for information gain. What does your page say that others don't? The same question decides which pages AI Overviews cite.
Strengthen business signals. Google Business Profile, reviews, and consistent name, address and phone details.
Be patient. Improvements are usually reassessed over weeks and often show fully at the next core update.

Mindset

Build for the customer reading the page, not the crawler. Sites built that way tend to gain in updates rather than lose.

A real example: my own site

In September 2026 I rebuilt this website on Next.js. I kept the homepage URL but changed most of the inner page URLs, and I didn't map every old URL to a new one. Within weeks, Google had dropped most of the inner pages. Nothing technical was blocking it: robots.txt was fine, every page said “index, follow”, the sitemap was clean and every URL returned 200.

It looked exactly like a core update hit, and it wasn't one. Two things had happened together. Old URLs that Google trusted now returned 404s. And the new pages read like generic agency copy, full of words like “dominate” and “architect”, with none of my real results on them. Those are exactly the habits my content quality checker now flags.

So I fixed both. I added 301 redirects for every old URL I could find. I rewrote every page in plain first-person language, with real numbers from client accounts: $544K in conversion value from $80.5K of Google Ads spend, and a real estate law firm account running at a 10.26% conversion rate. I also removed a stock photo that had been captioned as me. The homepage, whose URL never changed, stayed in Google throughout. The inner pages are being re-crawled now.

The lesson I'd pass on: before you blame the algorithm, check your own last three months of changes. Most drops I've investigated have a cause you can find in a changelog.

What I'd check first on your site

Search Console > Pages: the “Why pages aren't indexed” reasons, sorted by count.
Performance report: compare the 3 months before and after the drop, by page, not just in total.
Your About page and author bios: would a stranger believe a real person with real experience wrote this?
Your five most important pages: does each one contain something a competitor couldn't copy?