A 5-month technical SEO and authority-building partnership (December 2025 – May 2026) that took a site hit hard by a Google Spam Core Update and rebuilt its foundation, recovering rankings while direct competitors TopClassActions.com and ClassAction.org continued to lag.
OnlyClassActions had real assets going for it: deep content coverage and a modern Next.js stack. But a site-wide technical audit found it was severely penalized on Google's quality rater guidelines, zero author attribution across YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) legal content, no schema markup anywhere on the site, and over 6,000 orphaned pages search engines couldn't efficiently discover.
Then a Google Spam Core Update hit the entire class action space at once, dropping the site from a peak of roughly 827 ranking keywords down to 415.
| Site | Peak Keywords | Post-Update Drop | Current Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| OnlyClassActions.com | ~827 | Dropped to 415 | Recovered to 869+ (past prior peak) |
| TopClassActions.com | Similar drop | Similar drop | Lagging |
| ClassAction.org | Similar drop | Similar drop | Lagging |
“The Google update hurt everyone in the space. OnlyClassActions held up better than its competitors because of the technical foundation we built.”
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| SDO Score | 90% | 96% |
| High-priority issues | 101 | 1 |
| Medium-priority issues | 192 | 55 |
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referring Domains | 101 | 284 | +181% |
| Total Backlinks | 208 | 708 | +240% |
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Orphaned pages | 6,175 | 191 |
| Overall site issues | High | Significantly reduced |
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop performance | 94 | 98 | +4 pts |
| Mobile performance | 57 | 72 | +15 pts |
This wasn't just content and links. The majority of the work went into the technical foundation so Google could crawl, understand, and rank the pages that drive case volume.
Meta titles, descriptions, headings, internal linking, and keyword alignment.
High-quality, hand-placed links, not automated spam.
Added to expand link signals and authority at scale.
Written to target high-intent mass tort search terms.
Before, the site ranked for a broad mix of keywords, many with limited relevance to generating qualified legal leads. We refined targeting toward high-intent, mass tort search terms that directly align with case acquisition.
The site is now gaining visibility for terms tied to hair relaxer lawsuits, Ozempic-related claims, Dupixent cases, and Roundup litigation, exactly the queries from users actively searching for legal action.
Book a free strategy call. We will audit your current technical foundation, benchmark you against competitors in your space, and show you exactly what it would take to get results like this.