Chris Dicker, the Managing Director at Trusted Reviews, has been asking for advice on "traffic loss after traffic loss" for the site Trustedreviews.com. Google's John Mueller dropped some hints after "briefly" looking at the site and thread.
You probably want to first review the Google Webmaster Help thread where Chris asks "does Google think we are spam?" John did not reply in the thread but replied on Twitter. John said:
- The site is not spam
- The site is moving in the right direction
- Don't lose sleep over negative SEO (sounds like he is disavowing links that may be actually helping him rank?)
- Technical SEO is good but...
- Focus more on the overall site
- Big overall site changes take a while to show up in Google Search, it's not just about recrawling and reindexing.
... and when you make bigger changes across the whole (larger & older) site to significantly reach a higher level, that can take quite a bit of time to be reflected in search. It's not just a matter of recrawling & reindexing.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 8, 2020
It is always interesting to see when John Mueller gives specific advice to specific sites.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and Twitter.