Google’s June 2025 update is deleting your landing pages
- Manelik Sfez
- Jul 8
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 25
What happened, why it matters, and how to fix it
If your site had dozens, or hundreds, of landing pages targeting specific verticals, use cases, or industries, chances are: they’ve disappeared from Google. We have seen this with many of the websites we've built and optimized for SEO.
Since late May 2025, and progressively, thousands of sites have seen a sharp drop in indexed pages. Many report losing up to 80–90% of their landing pages in just a few days. You didn’t break anything, you didn’t get penalized, but the pages are gone from indexing because Google’s June 2025 update quietly rewrote the rules of indexation. And you're not alone in this situation.
This is a silent update with sometimes loud consequences
Google didn’t officially announce a major ranking change. There are no penalties mentioned. There was no warning. Just… (brutal) deindexing. It began around May 27–29, right before the official June 2025 algorithm adjustments. Search Console reports across industries show a wave of URLs marked as:
“Crawled – currently not indexed”
“Duplicate without user-selected canonical”
“Discovered – not indexed”
Most of them are landing pages by verticals or keyword cluster created for SEO.
But these weren’t spam pages
Recommended by experts for years and developed in frameworks like the Ski Slope Strategy (Content Mavericks), this SEO concept explicitly encouraged brands to create landing pages by verticals that weren’t doorway pages or generated junk, but followed accepted and ethical strategy. This structure was:
Create one landing page per vertical or audience segment
Reuse successful formats
Target niche or long-tail search terms with high intent
And it worked. These pages ranked, converted, and supported content clustering. Until they didn’t.
Why Google changed its logic
What’s happening now isn’t about penalizing site owners, but about protecting the integrity of Google’s own product. In clear, the update doesn’t target shady tactics but patterns that now resemble spam at scale, and even when created ethically.
In the past, building structured landing pages across verticals made sense. It showed relevance. It matched search behavior. But AI tools made it trivial in 2024–2025 to auto-generate thousands of “optimized” pages that technically follow the same logic yet offer no real substance.
The truth is, Google’s index is finite: crawling, rendering, and storing pages costs them real resources. And with millions of low-value pages now published every day, they’ve drawn a line. That’s why even legitimate, well-meaning structures are now filtered out.
The logic is maybe brutal, but it is fair: if a page looks like something that could’ve been mass-produced, regardless of whether it was or not, it’s now treated as disposable.
Why this shift makes sense (even if it’s frustrating)
Let’s be honest: most vertical pages were 80–90% identical; everybody knew it but it was still considered on both sides (Google and brands) an ethical strategy. Same copy, same layout, slightly different title, slightly different CTA. That’s fine when you write a few hundreds over time. But Google now sees hundreds of millions.
So yes, your pages were conceptualized, targeted and written with care. But structurally, they’re now indistinguishable from what AI spam engines are generating at scale. From Google’s perspective, this isn’t about punishing sites but about keeping results useful, fast, and human-centric.
And, frankly, we agree with that... even if it's frustrating for us as strategists. The update pushes everyone toward higher clarity and cleaner architecture. It’s forcing a distinction between real strategic content and scaled pattern generation.
What this means for your site
If your site was built using:
SEO landing pages by vertical or industry
Use-case clusters with 90% shared structure
Dozens of near-identical URL paths targeting variations of the same intent
...then most of those pages are now invisible to search engines.
They’re not blocked or penalized, they’re just ignored, which means they no longer support traffic, authority, or ranking depth.
What to do instead (and how we’ve already adapted)
We don’t recommend rebuilding what was lost. We’ve already moved toward a more robust approach:
a semantic content layer that speaks to both Google and users without congesting your visible site structure.
We consolidate use cases into a single intelligent page, and expand content on every main page
We enrich each page with layers of content (tagged, structured, and updated through AI) that are hidden to the human eye but visible and highly understandable for bots
We maintain lean site maps and fast navigation, while expanding indexable surface under the hood
The result is:
Fewer but deeper pages
More signals
Higher quality content
Better alignment with what Google now considers “worth indexing”
It’s more much work upfront. But it’s clean, scalable, and future-proof.
Want a clear plan to fix or relaunch your website?
Don’t guess. We created the Website Rebuild Blueprint to show you what a modern website needs to perform, and how to diagnose yours.
Inside:
Strategic checklist of must-haves
Diagram of how your site fits into your business ecosystem
Self-assessment scoring tool
Hidden traps to avoid in a rebuild
→ Download the Blueprint and get a clear view of where you stand.
Our final thought about Google’s June 2025 update
This isn’t the end of SEO (of course), it’s just the end of one tactic. The June 2025 update is a natural correction that had to happen, and not a punishment. And it's a reminder that shortcuts eventually collapse under scale and that structure matters as much as content.
If you’ve lost pages in this update, don’t try to rebuild what’s gone. Build what makes sense now and tomorrow.
About the author
Manelik Sfez, founder of the brand and digital transformation consultancy Ultrabrand, brings 25 years of international business, marketing, and brand strategy experience to the table. He has worked with some of the world’s most iconic brands throughout his career. From luxury goods to global retail, financial services and technological and industry giants, he has guided companies through brand-led transformations that have enabled significant business growth.
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