Purging/resetting website after major algorithm update (reviews update)

formalhorror

formalhorror

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Hi,
I got hit by the February (product) reviews update, just like many people here in Europe. I lost about 3/4 of the total traffic to my website.

Nevertheless, I am fairly confident that I can regain most of the traffic by updating the content and improving the overall website. I know what to do and how to do it.
My concern is that I do not want to wait until Google releases a new iteration of the reviews update to reevaluate my content. This could take month or even longer.
Now, here is an idea:

I have been considering temporarily replacing all of the content with blank pages and returning a 410 status code on every page. Then I will wait until Google deindexes the entire website by checking with "site:" and in Search Console. I'll probably wait for an additional month until Google purges the website from its index, just to be safe.

Once everything is gone, I will revive the website with updated content and more EEAT google can swallow.
This "should" force google to reevalute the website and rerun the review update algorithm.

Is this so stupid it might actually work? Has anyone tried this?
I understand I could just wait until there is a new review update, but this method would probably be faster. It's a bit of a gamble.
I know that I would loose all of my traffic for a couple of month, but there is not much left to lose.
What are your thoughts on this?
 
CCarter said:
The amount of mental hoops SEOs will jump through instead of just doing additional online marketing to generate traffic from other sources other than SEO is remarkable.
Click to expand...

Well, most people think they can't market their sites if they're built on answering random questions, but then you think about Wikihow and how they basically took an SEO "people also ask" spam site and turned it into comedy gold, by deliberately playing into their lameness, leading to people making them an evergreen meme.

611b56c1abc4b-clipimage-611a06042938d__700.jpg
 
@formalhorror, this won't work. People used to do that in the past after they killed off their sites with spam. They'd take the site down, put it up on a new domain to salvage the content and get rid of the links and other penalty-related problems, and Google eventually caught up and would penalize the new site too. It got to the point where they could do this fairly quickly. I'm sure they can do it even faster when it's on the exact same domain.

This is more than a gamble, in my opinion. You're going to irreparably damage your site, even if it logically seems like it wouldn't. The LAST thing you want is your URLs to drop from the index. Just roll out the improvements and wait on the product reviews update. They released 3 of them last year and already one this year as you know.

The next one is already being worked on. Instead of playing games, I'd start improving the content NOW so that you get those changes in on time. Because it's not like handing your homework in at the very last minute. You need your changes in place probably a couple months before the new update, which is when they start crunching data for it. You're already running late!
 
@Ryuzaki thank you for the explanation. I never been into spam so I did not know that this idea was abused before. I am working on the site and it is gonna be top notch in a couple of weeks.
 
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