A core update flattens your traffic overnight. A site migration goes wrong and three years of SEO work disappears in a week. A competitor points 80,000 spam links at your domain over a Bank Holiday weekend. An old agency leaves you with a backlink profile that needs four months of disavow work. We've handled every variant since 2011 — recovery is one of the largest single revenue lines we run, because it's where most adult businesses end up at least once.
Google rolls out a major update every few months. Adult sites get hit disproportionately because Google's confidence in adult content is structurally lower. If your traffic dropped within a 14-day window of an announced update, that's almost certainly it.
New design, new CMS, new domain, new URL structure — any of these can shed rankings if the migration isn't planned around URL preservation. Most common failure: forgetting to redirect old URLs, leaving Google to crawl 404s for weeks.
Less common than the previous two but real. Spam links pointed at your domain, content scraped and re-published, fake reviews seeded across review platforms. A determined attacker can degrade rankings within weeks.
Slowly degrading content, weak link-building over months, technical issues left unfixed. There's no single "drop" — just a quiet trend down over six to nine months. By the time it's noticed, recovery work is significant. About a third of our recovery cases fit this pattern.
GA4 traffic data, GSC ranking and indexation data, backlink profile from at least two link tools, on-page content analysis, technical state, competitor positioning. Output: a written diagnosis of what broke, in what order, and what's recoverable.
Sort findings into blockers (hurting now), remediation (need fixing), and growth opportunities (upside beyond recovery). You sign off the plan before any execution.
Crawl issues, render-blocking, broken redirects, indexation cleanup, schema gaps, Core Web Vitals, server-side issues. Most recovery cases have meaningful technical debt that has to be cleaned up before content or link work pays off.
Comprehensive disavow file, manual outreach for removable spam links, monitoring for ongoing negative SEO. Honest recovery on a heavily compromised profile takes a quarter at minimum.
Thin pages rewritten or merged, key commercial pages rebuilt to depth, internal linking architecture corrected, content programme restarted. Recovery turns into growth around month three.
If you're moving to a new design / CMS / domain: comprehensive 301 redirect map, staging migration, QA every URL, switch in low-traffic window. Done right, no positions lost during migration.
Total honest timeline: Three to six months for visible recovery. Six to nine months for full restoration plus growth. We don't sell anyone a 30-day recovery — that's not how this works.
The two-week audit priced as a standalone deliverable. Written diagnosis, priority breakdown, proposed plan with budget. Audit fee credited against month one if you proceed.
Full recovery work runs as a REIGN-tier SEO retainer — same as our top SEO package, but explicitly framed for recovery cases. Includes everything from REIGN plus disavow management, technical remediation, migration coordination.
Migrating but not in active recovery (moving to new design / CMS / domain on a healthy site)? Run as a fixed-scope project. Includes audit, redirect map, staging QA, post-launch monitoring.
We've seen every Google update from the inside since 2011 — Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, RankBrain, BERT, every Core Update from 2018 onwards. We've handled hundreds of disavow files. We've run dozens of clean migrations. The work is methodical, audit-led, and honest about timelines. We don't sell quick fixes because they don't exist.
If you suspect recovery work is needed — or you're about to migrate and want it done without losing positions — start with the audit. Two-week diagnosis, written plan, transparent pricing. If recovery isn't the right answer, we'll tell you that too.
info@wave69.co.uk · +44 208 150 3329 · Mon–Fri 9–18 GMT
