From Invisible to Page One – how we recovered and doubled organic traffic in nine months

In February 2024 we took on a site that, until mid-2023, drew 40% of organic traffic from Google Search.

On 26 July 2023 the Search Console graph crashed: impressions and clicks dropped to almost zero and stayed there for more than half a year.

A technical audit revealed four key issues:

1. robots.txt — blocked critical directories.

2. hreflang — inconsistent tags; PT, FR and EN versions competed with each other.

3. Toxic backlinks — hundreds of spam domains hurting authority.

4. Sitemap & 404s — many orphan URLs left after a poorly managed restructure.

   
   

Phase 1: technical recovery

We rewrote and validated the robots.txt, submitted a clean sitemap and requested re-indexing. In parallel we normalised international SEO with hreflang x-default plus PT-PT, EN-UK, EN-US and FR-FR / FR-BE pairs, ensuring reciprocal links between language versions.

To clean the link profile we exported every backlink, scored the risk, disavowed the most critical ones and emailed 36 webmasters; 22 removed their links. We still monitor weekly.

Next we fixed 404 errors and added strategic 301 redirects to preserve link equity. Finally, we tuned the Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint fell from 4.1 s to 1.4 s, and Interaction to Next Paint to 106 ms—thanks to image compression, JS reduction and a CDN.

Results were immediate: by May the site averaged ≈1 000 impressions and ≈50 clicks per day (up from < 20 impressions in January). Average position improved from 48 to 19.8 and CTR from 0.8 % to 3.4 %. Visibility was back—but we aimed higher than the pre-crash baseline.

Phase 2: authority & growth

We shifted focus to audience-centred content, publishing topic clusters aligned with search intent, refreshing older articles and adding structured data (FAQ, How-To). A digital PR campaign secured high-quality backlinks.

Six months later daily impressions hovered around 2 200 and clicks exceeded 110. Organic traffic accounted for 60 %+ of all visits, outpacing paid ads and social media.

Key lessons

• Always validate robots.txt—one stray “Disallow” can wipe you from the index.

• Proper hreflang prevents cannibalisation and opens international markets.

• Selective disavowal of toxic links still matters when spam is severe.

• Improved Core Web Vitals boost UX and speed up re-indexing.

After three months we restored visibility; in the next six we doubled organic traffic, now the site’s primary source.

If your project faces a similar decline, a rigorous technical audit plus strategic content can not only recover but multiply your reach in under a year.