Been running a small network of niche affiliate blogs, and search traffic got absolutely hammered after the last big core update. Last summer I brought in freelance writers to scale production. Copyscape showed zero direct plagiarism, but looking back, the structural flow reads like a robot wrote it. Pretty obvious they leaned hard on automated tools to hit word counts.
Now I'm working through cleaning up the index without deleting everything that might still be salvageable. Using Lynote AI's semantic analyser to audit the library - it flags programmatic sentence structures and spun paragraphs so I can see exactly which sections are tanking domain authority.
For anyone who's actually recovered from a content penalty, what worked better for you: rewriting the flagged sections from scratch, or just pruning the low-performing URLs altogether?
Someone in the thread suggested moving to a new domain - feels drastic but maybe they're right. Another said the answer was already in my question: if it still feels robotic, start by losing that feeling. Recovery's never guaranteed, but I'd rather fix than nuke if possible. Third reply warned against just rewriting those pages because the new content would still be based on the old non-human stuff - better to start fresh with human writing.
My gut says prune the worst offenders and rewrite the borderline ones with a proper human-first process. But I'd love to hear from anyone who's done the cleanup and lived to tell the tale.
