Tony Hill's Journey to 8 Million Monthly Pageviews After Bouncing Back from a Devastating Google Update

<p>Ready to take a bunch of notes that could help give your site a competitive advantage in the SERPs?</p> <p><!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>Tony Hill joins the Niche Pursuits podcast to share his experience recovering a website from a Google update.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>Tony's been building niche websites since 2005 and is very familiar with core updates.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>For instance, he had some health sites doing big numbers wiped out by the Medic Update. However, it was the May 2020 core update that was particularly devastating, causing his main 18-year-old site to lose almost half its traffic in just a few weeks.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>To recover from the update, Tony and his 10-person team formulated a bullet-proof game plan to recover the site.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>The strategy included a comprehensive process to improve the site's existing 1200 pages.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>They started by using Google's NLP API to analyze their content and improve its salience score. They found that word order is crucial to help the algorithm better understand your content. So at the sentence, paragraph, and article level, they made a deliberate effort to put the subject first.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>An academic tool called Sketch Engine also helped them to analyze language patterns in top-ranking articles on some of the biggest sites in the world. And found that using second-person language and specific, confident wording can improve content quality.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --></p> <p>So Tony and his team then reviewed their content to make it clearer and more confident, using specific and directive language. They didn't delete any articles but rather cut out fluffy sentences and paragraphs and added more information when needed.</p> <p><!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragrap