Recovering a B2B marketplace from a December 2022 algorithmic penalty

I joined after the December 2022 algorithmic update had already hit. The site was a large
B2B marketplace, traffic had been flat and depressed for roughly six months, and there was
no diagnosis on file — only the knowledge that rankings had fallen and had not come back.

The hard part was not finding problems. A site this size always has hundreds. The hard part
was working out which ones actually explained the drop, and in what order to fix them, on a
property where a single sitewide change touches hundreds of thousands of URLs.

• Ran the diagnosis first. Full technical, on-page and off-page audits before touching
  anything, so remediation was aimed at the penalty rather than at generic best practice.
• Sequenced the fixes. Changes went out in deliberate order with room to read the effect
  of each one. On a site this large, shipping everything at once destroys your ability to
  attribute any of it.
• Led the team end to end. Three SEO specialists, two editors and three writers, with
  team SOPs authored for keyword research, content optimisation and internal linking so the
  work stayed consistent after I handed it over.

Organic traffic rose 30% within six months of remediation starting, and the site left the
penalty plateau and returned to a growth trend. Over the documented window it recorded
1.46M clicks and 436M impressions.

The SOPs mattered as much as the recovery. The site needed to keep improving after I left,
which meant the fixes had to be repeatable by the team rather than dependent on me.

Google Search Consoleclick to enlarge