I’ll start with this image to save me writing–and you reading–1,000 words:

Absolutely brutal!

Cointelegraph started in 2013 and covers news on the blockchain/crypto/fintech niche. By all accounts a successful independent media site until late 2025 when they went from millions of organic traffic per month to basically zero. 

I saw someone post a screenshot of this in an SEO community I’m in, and was immediately intrigued.

Was this some kind of core algo update destruction?

No, it happened in September, no known algorithm updates–not until December, so this suggests a manual action.

Maybe the site shut down or something?

Nope, they are still an extremely prolific news site, and the site resolved just fine.

Okay, it looks like they lost about 450k keywords, so let’s start there and see if anything becomes clear. 

Here’s what I’m doing:

1 - Going to the “organic keywords” tab and isolating US-focused keywords:

2 - Clicking the “Position” drop down and selecting “lost” keywords:

3 - I immediately see a lot of non-English keywords they’re ranking for, so I further filter down to English only:

What immediately jumps out at me:

A bunch of the keywords lost were casino related. 

When I filter for that keyword, it becomes pretty clear:

Seeing this huge, unexpected push into iGaming, the picture starts to come into focus. Here's how the iGaming part of their site looked in late 2024: 

(You can see for yourself at this link)

And this here is what Google has to say about “Site Reputation Abuse:”

Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals.

And the chaser to that shot:

What is third-party content?

Third-party content is content created by a separate entity than the host site. Examples of separate entities include users of that site, freelancers, white-label services, content created by people not employed directly by the host site, and other examples listed in the site reputation policy.

So it looks to me like Cointelegraph partnered with a third party site to leverage its authority and tangential niche relevancy around the casino/gambling niche to produce a lot of content outside its core subject area, ranked incredibly well pushing affiliate content, and got subsequently banished to the shadow realm by Google. 

The Big Takeaway

Resist! As your authority grows and your site gobbles up more keywords and rankings, resist the urge to branch too far outside of your core niche. I know the temptation will be so strong, and I know this is an extreme example, but stay focused on the keywords you deserve to rank for and become the best in the world at that. You’ll be unstoppable (instead of stopped very suddenly, unfortunately).

A quick message to Cointelegraph

Hello! Cointelegraph team:

If you're reading this, first I want to say condolences. I've been on the same ride of having a very successful site lose 99% of organic traffic almost overnight and it sucks. I've been thinking about your predicament and have some ideas for you if you'd like to chat. You can reach me sean @ this URL you are reading this on, or on Telegram @ThisGuyRanks.

Please do get in touch!