Google HCU Terminated my Biggest Website, Here are my Thoughts
Google always loved surprises in the form of random algorithm updates, but the latest was uncompromising to many websites, including my own.
It took about 14 days to fully roll out, starting on September 14, 2023.
What was the September Helpful Content Update Focused On
As I followed the discussions through social networks, this update has shaken the SEO industry as a whole.
This targeted SEO-first content, written for search engines, not people. Although, “people first” content wasn’t something users experienced in SERPs after the update. To this day, you can find many queries with results conflicting with this goal.
For instance, this is the result for “how many legs does a human have.”
There are many theories on what kind of content or websites this went after — AI, unhelpful, low-quality, low EEAT, bad UX, etc. You can find stories supporting any of that.
But it’s a mixture of everything, and through my portfolio of sites, this update’s results are also inconsistent.
Here are my Thoughts
Let’s be honest; no one apart from the top engineers at Google knows.
You should realize first that Google is a business, a big one. They do stuff that will bring them more money. And pulling unhelpful websites down sounds like a rational move.
But many of these theories come from Google having an unlimited budget. People need to recognize how expensive it is to run a search engine and then calculate if their hypothesis makes sense.
With that said, I don’t think Google cares much about your social presence, unlinked mentions, or whether or not you have this and that certificate.
- They won’t base the search algorithm results on factors controlled by other companies.
- They won’t search their extensive database to find whether or not a person who has been mentioned (but not linked) as an expert does have a website.
- And I also think the same about original photos. I don’t think Google is analyzing pictures to that extent, but probably just comparing them to other images online based on broad characteristics.
But you can leverage those things to create trust not with Google but with your visitors. They will see you as a more trustworthy and real person and return to your site, telling Google you are good.
With my opinion about off-page signals expressed, I believe traffic, time on page, and engagement are the main measurements.
The quality of your content is, of course, also important, but let’s not forget that Google admits that the search engine does not understand content and can’t tell if it’s low quality or not.
Google will take the query a user entered and find content that fits not only for that but also for semantically related words.
However, the assessment of whether or not the content fits for the “most helpful” award has to be done based on other signals. Most definitely based on models that Google created from users’ behavior.
How did the Update Affect My Sites?
I can’t, nor want to, go into much detail about this.
But as I said before, it was inconsistent. A few websites dropped to the cold ground, and others remained more or less flat.
Let’s take a look at my formerly biggest website, which lost 95% of traffic after the Helpful Update.
To be completely honest, the website was already in decline for the last couple of months. But that was due to seasonality — the overall traffic went down, although we didn’t lose any positions (at least from the ones we track).
The most significant drop came after one of the biggest articles on this site went entirely out of results. So I wake up to this:
What’s my Plan?
I was ready for a decline but not that ready.
I am still trying to work out a strategy for recovery.
One other confession: this site was a bit neglected the last year. Because of the composition of the traffic, I had no incentive to work on it.
Most of the traffic came from India, Pakistan, and other poorer countries, bringing poor RPM and low conversions. And I needed and still need to figure out the right approach for a site bringing tens of thousands of visitors every month but converting to little to no revenue.
Don’t worry; I will inform you once I figure something out! Until next time,
Tomáš
PS: You can follow me here so you don’t miss out on new articles.
PPS: Did you know you can click the clap icon 👏 at the bottom, and it will change color? 😱
