Real-world SEO case studies and post-mortems — algorithmic penalties, recoveries, and the lessons behind them.
I handed a real technical-SEO backlog to a constrained Claude Code agent wired to the Search Console API. A teardown of what it got right, where it hallucinated, and the guardrails that made it useful.
When Google demotes your site algorithmically, you cannot apply for reconsideration. You can only signal recovery and wait. Six sprints in order, the signal to watch in each, and the realistic rebound window.
Slug bucketing, regex patterns, the templated-AI scoring rubric, the whitelist of exceptions, and the four-disposition decision tree — the full 30-minute audit, copy-paste ready.
A site cleaned up 363 thin posts on May 23. The penalty arrived June 5. Algorithmic re-evaluation runs on its own clock — usually 14 to 21 days. Here is the editorial decision log that keeps you from misreading the lag.
Word count is the most overrated SEO signal in 2026. Sites with 1,500+ word posts get demoted; sites with 800-word posts rank top three. Here is the quality rubric that replaces length as a signal.
A 1,200-post site lost 99.6% of its traffic in a single day despite averaging 1,250+ words per post. The reason is not depth — it is signature similarity at scale. Here is what Google’s classifier is actually reading.