In September 2023, a well-established food blog with hundreds of recipes and 10,000+ visitors per day was suddenly hit hard by Google’s September 2023 Helpful Content Update.
Practically overnight, the blog lost nearly all of its organic search visibility—recipes stopped showing in the carousel, star ratings vanished, and traffic from Google flatlined.
After trying to fix the issue with a site redesign, the blog owner turned to The Foodie HQ to get to the root of the problem. What followed was a months-long process of deep SEO cleanup, content restructuring, and a long wait for Google to take notice.
And now, the results are finally in.
Phase 1: A Fresh Design With Better UX
The blog was initially using Foodie Pro—a dated theme that hasn’t aged well in terms of user-friendliness, performance, or clarity. While the content itself hadn’t changed, the overall user experience was falling short of Google’s evolving expectations. Not to mention, the site was bloated with plugins like Feast just to be able to have mobile menus.
The design team at Designeo stepped in to help. They created a custom WordPress theme that focused on:
- Mobile-first, fast-loading pages
- Improved category and recipe navigation
- Streamlined internal linking
- Better layout for recipe cards and content sections
The new theme launched in December 2024, and the results were immediate—organic traffic returned, recipes reappeared in the search carousel, and things seemed to be back on track.
But only for a few weeks.
Between the end of December 2024 and the beginning of January 2025, the blog’s traffic dropped again. This time, we knew it wasn’t just the theme/design that was having a negative impression on Google Search traffic.
Phase 2: A Deep Content Audit
That’s when Designeo brought in the team at The Foodie HQ.
We performed a comprehensive audit and identified several major SEO issues that had likely triggered Google’s algorithmic filters or even spam policy violations. There were:
- Large portions of low-quality, duplicate content with no added value
- Many health claims in 300+ posts
- Poor internal link structure and outdated tagging
- Orphaned posts and bloated archives
It wasn’t a matter of fixing a few pages. The entire content foundation needed to be rebuilt (300+ posts).
Phase 3: The Recovery Plan
Over the next four months, we:
- Removed hundreds of health claims on 300+ posts
- This was an exceptionally challenging task considering that we needed to scrape 300+ posts and identify keywords that were potentially linked to health claims. Fortunately, we have a very extensive and curated list of keywords that help us find potential claims very quickly across the entire site. If you’re interested in learning more about this, you can contact us for more information.
- Removed duplicate and thin content
- Restructured categories and cleaned up tags
- Manually updated schema to follow current best practices
- Improved internal linking across the entire site
- Removed unnecessary or conflicting plugins
We also tracked crawl activity in Search Console and submitted updated sitemaps to encourage Google to reindex the cleaned-up site.
Phase 4: Waiting for Google to Rebuild Trust
After a site has violated Google’s spam policies—even unintentionally—recovery doesn’t happen instantly. This phase of the process is called the “trust rebuilding phase”. The best way I can describe it is it is a set period of time (usually about 6 months) that Google will spend crawling, recrawling, and reassing the trustworthiness of a site. It doesn’t always take that long but many times it does.
Unfortunately, Google is fast to make up its mind about a site, but VERRRRRY slow to change their mind.
We advised the blog owner that it would likely take at least 6 months for Google to fully recrawl the site, reassess the content, and restore visibility—if no new violations were found.
This phase requires the utmost patience, consistency, and a willingness to trust the process. I admit it is the part of the process that is the most difficult. Identifying the issue and correcting it is often quite straightforward. But, the waiting game and continuation of content creation that is helpful and doesn’t violate any policies…that is the real test of “trusting the process”.
The Results (as of August 21, 2025)
Well, that trust, consistency, and patience paid off for this food blogger.
- Organic search traffic is returning steadily
- Recipes are once again showing up in Google’s rich recipe results
- Star ratings are displaying correctly sitewide
- Overall engagement is improving with the better user experience
The blog is now well-positioned for sustainable long-term growth—with a clean design, a strong SEO foundation, and content that genuinely helps readers.
Takeaways for Food Bloggers
If your site was hit by the Helpful Content Update and hasn’t recovered, the problem may go deeper than design or keywords. In many cases, it’s about rebuilding trust with Google—and that takes a mix of:
- Content quality
- Technical SEO cleanup
- Time
At The Foodie HQ, we specialize in helping food bloggers recover from traffic drops, get back in Google’s good graces, and future-proof their content for the next wave of algorithm updates.
