What happened to my own site
The previous Globe Skillz site had a page for nearly every city and industry combination: “SEO for dentists in Ohio”, “web design in Florida”, and many more. Each one was a slight variation of the others. They ranked for a while. Then an update arrived and the whole site dropped.
That’s a textbook doorway page pattern, and Google is right to devalue it. The site you’re reading now is the fix: fewer pages, each describing a service I actually offer, backed by real work.
What Google is penalizing
- Doorway pages: many near-identical pages targeting keyword or location variations, all leading to the same thing
- Scaled content: pages produced in bulk (by AI or templates) mainly to rank, with little original value
- Thin pages: e-commerce examples include empty tag pages, filter URLs and collections with one or two products
- Unhelpful content: pages written for search engines rather than people, without first-hand experience
Finding the problem pages
- Export every indexed URL from Search Console and your crawler
- Group them by template, such as products, collections, tags, blog and pages
- For each group, check clicks over the last 12 months. Large groups with almost no clicks are the main suspects.
- Read a sample. If several pages could swap their keywords and still read the same, you’ve found the pattern.
The recovery plan
- Remove pages with no value and no links (return 410, or noindex if they’re needed for navigation)
- Merge near-duplicates into one strong page and 301 redirect the rest
- Improve the pages that remain with expertise, original images, specifics and an author
- Wait for the next core update. Recovery usually shows up then, not right away.
Honest timeline: recovery often takes until the next core update, which means months. Removing bad pages quickly and improving the remaining ones is what gets a site ready for that update.
If your store lost traffic after an update, a Shopify SEO audit is the right place to start.
Saqib Ali runs Globe Skillz, a Shopify SEO studio with development built in. Since 2019 he has worked on 180+ projects for merchants in 42 countries. More about Saqib →