Is 3rd place possible with a blank page?

In this experiment, we discussed how to bring back a piece of content that suddenly disappeared from the SERP after a Google update.

Problem

Content with an average position of 5 and a 3-month traffic value of 1000 disappears from the SERP after the Google update.

Datas

The index status of the content is active. There is no index problem. It is experiencing losses in all words where it has previously ranked well and is not visible. No updates were made before the content disappeared.

Method

All content on the page has been "DELETED" to resolve the issue. The content has been returned to an "EMPTY" page except for the heading.

Results

The content returned to an empty page started to be seen again in similar positions in its old words within 10 hours. When the content on the SERP is examined, it goes to a completely empty page.

Is it possible to rank 3rd with zero content/empty page?

According to Google, yes!

I continue to experiment with the "sudden loss of position in SERP", which is common after the latest updates (October 2023).

In this experiment, I tried to bring back our content that previously had an average position value of 5, brought 3,000 traffic in 6 months and suddenly disappeared from the SERP.

First, meaningful paragraphs were added to the content to bring it back,
We waited for a while but the content did not come back,
The content slug structure was then changed,
Again, no gains were made,
To get the content back, I finally deleted all the content in the post except the title. I turned the page into a blank page.
Then I requested index via Google console.
My content, which had been missing from the SERP for 15 days, returned to its old positions within 10 hours.

The content is empty, the page is empty. But I continue to be on page 1.

Google seems to have taken a big step forward in "Useful Content".

Reminder; This experiment may not give the same result for every project. But it is a clear indication of how inefficient Google is in Turkish search results.