WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TRAVEL REPUBLIC AND HOW I (PARTIALLY) RECOVERED IT
- Joe Johnson
- Dec 22, 2025
- 7 min read
Between May 2024 and August 2025, Travel Republic was impacted by a series of Google Core and Spam updates that resulted in a sustained and material loss of organic visibility. Unlike a single algorithmic hit, this period was characterised by repeated declines following successive updates, each compounding the effects of the last.
3rd party tools like SEM Rush aren't always reflective of reality, but in this case, the estimated traffic closely mirrored what was happening in reality.
SERM Rush - 2 Years
Sistrix (via Looker) - 2 Years
Moz STAT (Curated Keyword List) - 2 Years
Moz STAT (Curated Keyword List) - 1 Year
N.B. The Moz STAT data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt because the curated list of keywords was tweaked several times, and Google's &n=100 in September dramatically impcated average position
At the lowest point (around September-October 2025), non-brand organic traffic declined by nearly 70% year on year, significantly impacting conversions, revenue and margin as well as the overall profitability of all channels combined (paid search was increasingly relied upon).
Interestingly, it was the site reputation abuse update in May 2024 that had the biggest impact on visibility, which is odd because most of the sites heavily impcated at the time appeared to be publishers peddling voucher code pages... I've highlighted the other updates below that had significant impacts on visibility.
A Pattern, Not a One-Off Update
Early analysis showed that visibility drops aligned closely with confirmed Google Core and Spam updates. Importantly, there was no meaningful recovery between updates, which strongly suggested a site-wide quality issue rather than isolated ranking losses, collateral damage or other sites simply beating Travel Republic; there was a clear intention to seriously demote the site
.
This pattern is typical when a domain is failing to meet Google’s evolving quality thresholds. Core updates do not target individual pages; instead, they reassess overall value, trust, and usefulness across whole domains, or at the very least, broad sections of the site.
WHERE DID THE BIGGEST LOSSES COME FROM?
The keywords and pages driving the biggest losses did, of course, shift over the months, but on the whole, the largest traffic losses came from;
High-volume generic travel keywords e.g. 'cheap holidays', 'all inclusive holidays'. 'holidays' (this really stung because there had been significant investment in link building to get Travel Republic to compete on page 1 for these terms, which it did for a while)
Destination-specific keywords e.g. 'dubai holidays'
Ultimately, the vast majority of site sections were down heavily, but the highest volume keywords with page 1 rankings unsurprisingly contributed heavily to the losses
Above are the keywords driving the biggest losses from October to December 2025
Deep-Dive Audit: What the Data Revealed
A comprehensive SEO audit was conducted across Google Search Console, crawl data, and server logs. One issue stood out above all others: index bloat driven by thin content at scale.
At the time of investigation, roughly 120,000 URLs from the domain were indexed by Google. A significant proportion of these pages shared common characteristics:
Minimal and/or boilerplate content
Programmatically generated page templates
Pages with no product
Little unique value for the user beyond targeting long-tail keyword variations
Individually, many of these pages appeared harmless. Collectively, they diluted overall site quality and sent weak signals during algo updates.
These 120,000 URLs with thin/spam content existed because in late 2023, the product offering, and therefore the site was overhauled to massively reduce the number of hotels on sale (there was roughly a 90% reduction).
The issue was that each of the decommissioned hotels was then redirected to the landing page of the destination it was located in. In most cases, that destination page had minimal boilerplate content and as a result of this overhaul, no product.
For example, the 'Hilton Uzbekistan' was redirected to the 'Uzbekistan Holidays' page. This page had boilerplate text and no product (because all of the hotels in that destination were taken off sale). Not the best recipe for a site demonstrating high-quality, helpful content.
I've added a few examples of these types of pages below (no, I've never heard of any of these places either)
Imagine having ~120,000 of these pages, all crawlable and indexable. The worst thing was that there were only around 20,000 pages in the site hierarchy and in the XML sitemap (i.e. pages I wanted to be indexed), so in Google's eyes, potentially 83% of the site was spam.
This wasn't a problem until it was. And then it was a big problem.
Why Thin Content at Scale Is So Risky
Google’s documentation increasingly emphasises helpfulness, originality, and user value. When a large percentage of indexed pages fail to meet these criteria, the issue becomes domain-level rather than page-level.
In Travel Republic’s case, the volume of low-value URLs likely:
Reduced Google’s confidence in the site’s overall quality
Consumed crawl budget inefficiently
Weakened internal linking signals
Increased exposure during Spam updates focused on scaled or programmatic content
This made the site particularly vulnerable between 2024 and 2025, as Google intensified its focus on spam prevention and content quality.
The funny thing is, everyone seems to panic about AI-generated content, but the situation at Travel Republic was far-worse than this. None of this content was 'AI-Generated', but it was automated and mass-produced on an industrial scale.
For me, the issue isn't how the content is produced; it's whether the content provides value, and in this case, very little of it did.
You'd be right in thinking that the root of the issue lies in the desire to have a page for every city, region and country on the globe. This strategy was most likely pushed a decade ago (or more) and likely worked well while;
All the landing pages had a product listed, i.e. they had a use or purpose
Google were more lenient with unhelpful content/mass mass-produced pages/spam
We are not in that world anymore.
Choosing the Right Remediation Strategy
The next challenge was deciding how to address the issue. Removing pages outright was not always practical, as many still served niche user needs or supported internal site functionality.
Instead, a strategic decision was made to focus on index quality rather than URL deletion.
Each page type was reviewed and categorised into one of three groups:
Pages to remain indexed and improved
Pages useful for users but not search engines
Pages providing no meaningful value
For the second and third categories, noindex tags were implemented to clearly signal to Google that these URLs should not be considered for ranking.
A Slow but Deliberate Cleanup
This was not a quick fix. The process required precision and collaboration with other teams to avoid accidentally removing valuable pages from the index.
Sure, I could look at pages that didn't meet an arbitrary click or impression threshold within a given time period, but it wasn't that simple. Some of these thin pages had driven a conversion in the past, some had to remain because they were part of partner marketing activity.
This was not quick or easy.
Over several months, indexed URLs steadily declined. By late October 2025, the number of indexed pages had dropped from approximately 120,000 to around 20,000.
Since around February 2025, indexed pages have been declining (annoyingly, I can only show the last three months of index data in GSC), while impressions have been increasing. This is as good as absolute confirmation that the superfluous, spammy pages were negatively impacting the rest of the rest
This is always roughly the number of pages that should have been in the index, and roughly the number of pages I wanted in the index, as evidenced by the number of indexable, canonical pages in our crawls.
This reduction represented a dramatic improvement in index hygiene and ensured that Google’s algorithms were primarily evaluating the site based on its strongest content.
The December 2025 Core Update and Early Recovery
Following the index cleanup, Travel Republic saw some positive movement after the December 2025 Google Core Update (this is still rolling out at time of writing). Visibility trends finally began to reverse, with gradual improvements in impressions and rankings across non-brand queries.
One site section (hotels) is even up 10% YoY
SERM Rush - 6 Months
Moz STAT - 6 Months
While recovery from site-wide quality issues is rarely immediate, the timing strongly suggests that improved index quality played a key role in the rebound.
Perhaps more importantly, this (partial recovery) is a sign that Google has regained trust in the site, and that there is now a solid foundation on which to rebuild visibility back to the previous highs of Q1 2024.
What This Case Demonstrates
This experience highlights several important realities of modern SEO:
Core updates evaluate entire domains, not individual mistakes
Thin, boilerplate content can become harmful when it reaches sufficient scale (it is hard to say exactly what this threshold is, but at one point spam content likely made up ~83% of Travel Republic's URLs)
Index management should be an on-going strategic SEO discipline, not a technical afterthought. This doesn't mean trying to force every page that exists into the index
Any time a significant change is made that impacts the site (in this case, decommissioning hundreds of thousands of products), SEO should be involved from the start. If you don't have an in-house SEO or an agency, use an SEO consultant
Recovery is possible, but only after Google has had time (and probably a couple of updates) to reassess the improved quality
Good SEO takes time. Not only to do the work, but for the work to be recognised by Google
For this reason, senior leaders need patience, and there should never be an overreliance on one channel - most sites in their lifetime will be negatively impacted (to a degree) by an algo update at some point
For large, template-driven websites, the lesson is clear: fewer, better pages will almost always outperform large volumes of low-value content in the long run.
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