Turning around a declining SEO site through two Core updates

Since October 2025, prmotion.me — a service selling followers and engagement across Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, VK and TikTok — had been rapidly losing rankings and traffic. By February 2026, when I joined the project, its key pages sat at positions 15–25 — effectively invisible, on page two or three of Google.

Three problems at once, not one

• A "grey" niche. Engagement-boosting services are a niche Google treats with above-default suspicion — manual action risk and E-E-A-T scrutiny well beyond an ordinary commercial site.
• Two major Core updates during the engagement. Stabilizing a declining site around even one core update is a challenge; here there were two back to back, at the worst possible moment for a recovery.
• Starting from a deep hole. Not "optimizing a good site" — a turnaround from positions 15–25, where commercial pages effectively weren't shown to buyers at all.

What was done

• Page speed to 85–90 on PageSpeed. Together with the dev team, no tricks — strict, methodical execution of PageSpeed Insights' own recommendations, one by one.
• An expert built for E-E-A-T. The method and result are covered in a separate article — "Where to Find an E-E-A-T Expert: I Built One".
• Every commercial page's copy rewritten — not cosmetic edits, a full rewrite around real queries and buyer intent.
• Structured markup added — Product, Listing, Person, Article, Organization — the site became machine-readable where it used to be just HTML.
• Snippets rewritten using the method from "How to Write a Meta Description That Google Will Use."
• A daily blog content pipeline built — not a one-off push, a running process.
• TrustPilot connected, old negative reviews addressed — a reputation signal both buyers and the search engine read.

The result

Key rankings are back in the top 10 — and that's not a vague claim, here are the actual numbers on the core commercial queries:

The decline stopped: March–May held a flat, stable traffic line at the bottom of the drop, with no further slide even through the core updates. Real growth started in June — traffic climbed from a ~8–9K plateau to 16K by the end of July, more than double the low point.

The recovery shows up in visibility across the platforms the service is built around too — Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, VK, TikTok:

None of these steps is impressive on its own — page speed, markup, copy, reviews, a publishing habit. What's impressive is doing all of it together, seeing it through, and not dropping it halfway while Google changed the rules twice along the way.

Maxim Safianov

I work at the intersection of technical SEO and software engineering: helping sites stay visible for classic search and AI answers alike, and building the Python tooling that automates it.