The situation
whichkitchenappliance.com was a well-performing UK kitchen appliance affiliate blog. At its pre-collapse peak: 68 keywords in the top 3, 157 in the top 10, and 365 in the top 100 — average position 44.39, estimated daily traffic 72.66 [SEMrush Landscape, Nov 24–30, 2021]1. Google Analytics confirmed 147,325 en-gb users and 168,276 sessions between April 2021 and January 2022 [Google Analytics export, Apr 2021–Jan 2022]2.
On November 28, 2021, organic traffic collapsed sharply. Lisa reached out in February 2022 unable to identify the cause.
The diagnosis question
The first task was distinguishing between a site-side technical failure and a Google algorithm update. The GA traffic graph was annotated directly using raw GA data — not third-party approximations — to identify the collapse date.
What the crawl found
A Screaming Frog technical crawl identified the cause. Multiple key content pages in the /cookers/ category were returning 403 Forbidden (Client Error) / Non-Indexable [Screaming Frog crawl, Feb 2022]:
- /cookers/electric-cookers-induction-vs-ceramic-cooker-tops/
- /cookers/how-to-buy-a-new-gas-cooker/
- /cookers/range-cooker-guide/
- /cookers/what-is-a-range-cooker/
- /cookers/do-electric-cookers-come-with-plugs/
- /cookers/what-are-the-different-range-cooker-sizes/
- /cookers/does-le-creuset-work-with-induction-hobs/
One additional page had been incorrectly canonicalised. A secondary crawl filtered to image files found 523 image URLs in /wp-content/uploads/ also returning 403 Forbidden [Screaming Frog crawl, Feb 2022] — Content-Type was text/html, not image files, eliminating the site’s entire image SEO footprint simultaneously.
The outcome
| Metric | Pre-collapse (Nov 24–30, 2021) | Post-collapse (Dec 8, 2021) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top-3 keywords | 68 | 5 | −91% (64 lost) |
| Top-10 keywords | 157 | 56 | −64% (101 lost) |
| Organic visibility | 9.60% | 2.50% | −7.74pp |
| Estimated daily traffic | 72.66 | 24.84 | −66% |
[SEMrush Landscape, Nov 24–30 and Dec 8, 2021]1
347 keywords declined simultaneously in a two-week window against 14 improving [SEMrush, Dec 2021]1.
The recommendation — and what happened
Roll back to the prior URL structure to restore indexed paths, then rebuild the architecture correctly from a stable baseline. Lisa chose not to implement the rollback. The engagement concluded at the diagnostic stage.
What this demonstrates
Sequencing the diagnosis correctly — rule out algorithm event first using raw GA data before diagnosing a technical cause — is the correct method for any unexplained ranking collapse.
Sources
SEMrush. Landscape report for whichkitchenappliance.com, Nov 24–30, 2021 and Dec 8, 2021. Keyword visibility, top-3/top-10/top-100 counts, average position, and estimated daily traffic on file. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Google Analytics. Session and user export for whichkitchenappliance.com, April 2021–January 2022. En-gb geographic segment. ↩︎