What this is, and what it is not

This is FundedTrading.com, a prop firm review and media site owned by FinMedia Group, where I am Head of Media. It is not a client project. I am not naming a client anywhere on this site, so every number I publish comes from a property I run and can show in full.

That is a limitation and I would rather say it than hide it. I chose the strategy, I did the work, and I am reporting on myself. What I can offer instead of independence is completeness. I am not cropping the window to the part that flatters me, and the section near the bottom lists what this does not prove.

Two things you should know before the numbers. The recovery is fourteen days old at the time of writing, which is long enough to rule out daily noise and not long enough to call it permanent. And the site is still below where it was in 2025. This is a recovery in progress, not a growth story.

The numbers

All figures are Google Search Console, domain property, web search, Search Console’s own dates. I use matched forty-two day windows so the comparison is like for like.

Read on its own, that table says the site got worse for a year. The last window is the weakest of the three. But the last window contains the turn, and averaging across it hides the turn completely, which is exactly why a forty-two day view is the wrong lens for a step change.

Here is the same period split at 6 September 2026.

Clicks per day went up 119 percent. Impressions went up 88 percent. Average position roughly halved, from the middle of page four to the bottom of page two, and it moved on a single day rather than climbing gradually. It has held between 16 and 20 every day since.

Across the full three months the property records 1.88 thousand clicks and 335 thousand impressions at 0.6 percent click-through and position 30.6. That average is dragged down by the ten flat weeks in front of the turn.

What I did before any of it moved

The work was not clever. It was the boring version of the job, done to a site that had a site-level problem I am not detailing on a public page, because it is my employer’s property and it is fixed.

I pruned. A large amount of thin content came off the site in September 2025, most of it news posts and short pieces that had never earned an impression. Some of it was deleted, some of it was set to noindex where the page still had a reason to exist for readers but no reason to be in the index.

I rewrote rather than republished. The pages that stayed were rebuilt around one search each instead of several, with the titles, headings and internal links fixed to match. Where two pages were competing for the same query, one of them stopped trying.

I kept publishing through the decline, which in hindsight is the part I am least sure about. See the section on what I would do differently.

None of this produced a visible result for six and a half months. That is the single most useful thing in this case study, so I want to be blunt about it. There was no week where the graph responded to a specific fix. The line stayed flat from March to August 2026 while the work was already finished.

The finding: the pages that recovered were already written

This is the part I did not expect, and it is the reason the case study is worth publishing rather than just the numbers.

When the site came back, it did not come back on new content. It came back on pages that had been sitting at position 20 to 35 for months, doing nothing. Same fourteen day windows, before and after.

Look at the last row. The one page that was already ranking did not move. It was at position 6.7 before and 6.4 after, and its clicks went down slightly. Everything else on the list jumped between ten and twenty-six positions at once.

A seventh page belongs here too. The free prop firm trading competitions page was under two clicks in the before window and took 100 clicks in the after window at position 9.8.

That pattern only reads one way. This was not individual pages winning on their merits. It was a site-level ceiling lifting, and every page that had been pressed against it from below came up at the same moment. The page that was already above the ceiling felt nothing.

For an operator, the practical version of that is this. If your whole site is suppressed, page-level work will not show you whether it is working. You will do good work and see a flat line, and the only evidence you get is later, all at once. Judging the work by the weekly graph during that period would have told you to stop doing the thing that eventually paid.

The lag was six and a half months

The cleanup finished in mid February 2026. The movement came on 6 September 2026. That is roughly six and a half months from fix to response.

Most of what is written about recovery after a prune or a site-level problem suggests around five months. This took longer. I do not know whether that is because the site is in a category Google is careful with, because the fix was later than I think it was, or because there is no reliable number and five months was always a guess repeated until it sounded like a fact.

If you are an operator waiting on a recovery, the useful takeaway is to budget for longer than the blog posts say and to decide in advance how long you are willing to wait, because the temptation to start over at month four is strong and starting over resets the clock.

What the traffic is worth

The queries coming back are commercial ones. Cheapest funded account, 50k funded account price, a-book prop firms, prop firm competition. These are traders comparing options with a card in hand, not people reading a glossary.

That is a function of what survived the prune. The pages that came off were informational filler with no commercial destination. The pages that stayed were the ones a trader reads before paying. When the ceiling lifted, what came back up was the part of the site that earns.

What I would do differently

I would stop publishing during the decline. I kept producing while the site was suppressed, and none of that content is in the recovery table. Every page that came back was written before the problem started. I spent months of production on content that arrived into a site that could not rank it, and I would now put that effort into fewer, better pages held back until the site could carry them.

I would separate the two questions earlier. Is this page bad, or is this site suppressed? I spent time optimising individual pages that were fine. The clue was sitting in the data the whole time, which is that pages of wildly different quality were all stuck in the same position band.

I would have set the measurement up first. I rebuilt the timeline afterwards from Search Console, which worked, but only because the property had sixteen months of history. If I had annotated the changes as I made them I could tell you today which fix mattered. I cannot.

What this does not prove

I am listing this because most case studies in this industry do not, and because you should not take a single site as a method.

It does not prove the prune caused the recovery. The interval is six and a half months and a lot of things happened inside it, including a site rebuild. Nothing in Search Console lets me attribute a single day’s movement to a single action, and I have not identified what changed on 6 September.

It does not prove the recovery will hold. Fourteen days of stable position is evidence, not a guarantee. This page carries dates precisely so you can check whether I came back and updated it.

It is not a growth number. The site is at 51 clicks a day against 64 a day before the collapse. Calling that a percentage gain would be true and misleading at the same time, which is the standard trick in SEO case studies and is why the 2025 baseline is in the first table.

It is one site, in one market, run by the person reporting on it.

How I work on this

If your site is in this position, the diagnosis comes before anything else, because the answer decides whether you should be fixing pages or waiting. That is what the prop firm SEO work starts with, and what it costs and why there is no package is set out separately. Other dated work on properties I run is on the work page.

Send me your Search Console