Is Google’s Helpful Content Update 2024 Killing Niche Blogs For Good?
Why did your website lose 90% of its traffic overnight, and despite your best efforts, you still can’t regain your rankings?
The Helpful Content Update (HCU), rolled out by Google in 2023–2024, has severely impacted many blogs, leading many to believe that blogging is dead.
Many bloggers reportedly lost a remarkably high amount of organic traffic, sometimes as much as 90% over the last few months.
Some argue that this paradigm shift signals the demise of traditional blogging, effectively ending an industry that involves millions of bloggers worldwide.
Conversely, other SEO experts (and Google itself) claim that this is a positive development, rewarding high-quality websites while rooting out bad, spammy ones that manipulated search results, finally putting an end to many widespread black-hat practices.
In the meantime, users report finding sketchy results when searching for some keyword on Google, with bad sites ranking better than good ones, and entire pages disappearing from SERPs altogether.
While knowing exactly what was going on is always impossible when it comes to Google updates (especially the 2023–2024 HCU one), we can look out for some data to at least try to figure out what happened so far and what the future of search engine optimization (SEO) and blogging will be.
TL;DR
- Google’s EEAT guidelines are probably a lie, or at least, a portion of it doesn’t work as intended.
- Website traffic and returning visitors seemingly matter more than actually writing good content.
- Several domains like Quora, Reddit, Forbes and YouTube are receiving some form of hidden, unjustified advantage that helps them rank.
- E-commerces are seemingly unaffected by the HCU, screwing up SERPs even more.
- Site-wide penalties are retroactive, and can pretty much kill your website, especially if it’s old enough.
What Defines “Good Content” After Google’s Last Updates?
The purpose of each Google update is to improve the overall quality of the results received by users for a certain query.
Over the last year, their main goal was to target all manipulative tactics that attempted to game the system by employing spam links and other black-hat SEO techniques.
The latest updates that were rolled in August, September, October and December 2023, and then again on March 2024, are collectively called the Helpful Content Update (HCU), and they represent a core update — which means a much more radical, game-changing update than regular rollouts.
According to Google’s latest guidelines, websites that keep pushing good, human-written content should see their rankings improve after these core updates. In particular, quality raters are supposed to reward websites that get high E-E-A-T scores.
E-E-A-T is an acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and although it’s not a new concept (it was first announced in 2022), it seems that all the latest Google updates focused on serving results with high E-E-A-T scores.
Let’s have a look at what that means:
Experience and Expertise:
Experience and expertise mean that content should be written by authors who are true experts in their own fields.
While these two concepts nearly overlap, they are both there to ensure that if the content is written by someone who is really knowledgeable about that topic, that content will be rewarded, regardless of whether this knowledge comes from academic titles or hands-on experience.
Authoritativeness:
This is similar to experience and expertise, but rather than measuring the knowledge of the author of the content itself, authoritativeness measures the credibility of the entire website.
This is a measure of your site’s reputation, and it’s often measured by evaluating its overall backlink profile and online reviews.
Trustworthiness:
How faithful is your content to the topic at hand? Is your page genuinely there to provide information about a given topic, or it’s just a long-winded ad to sell some product?
Factual accuracy, proper sources, and security of the users accessing that page are all factors that define trustworthiness. For example, if your page is still hosted on an HTTP rather than an HTTPS server, your trustworthiness score will be quite low.
In theory, we should see better, higher-quality websites written by authoritative sources getting more organic traffic as they rank higher in SERP results. In practice, this is not always true, and what’s happening is quite the opposite.
Is the Helpful Content Update Killing Independent Blogs?
Besides the theory, what happened, as a fact, is that an enormous amount of people running a blog saw their website lose huge amounts of traffic (sometimes up to 80–90%) over the course of days or weeks. In some cases, it is quite evident how the effect was the opposite of what was intended.
The most egregious example are travel blogs, which are websites where people share their experiences while traveling around the world.
In theory, these websites should be exactly what Google wants: they’re 100% human-made, they’re full of genuinely taken pictures, and they provide helpful advice to other travelers that come from direct experience.
The most prominent travel bloggers also possess significant knowledge and personal expertise on this topic that can be easily shared with their public.
Yet, they’re quickly dying out.
There are countless examples of similar effects on independent blogs, and it seems that AI-assisted, short, and shallow content is by all means killing off human-made, genuinely helpful content literally everywhere.
Sometimes, pages or even entire websites apparently disappear from SERPs without rhyme or reason, causing severe traffic drops that find no explanation.
Another example coming from my personal SEO experience are these two pages about paracetamol and alcohol and mimosa hostilis, which used to rank in position #1 or #2 for a lot of relevant keywords.
Despite the fact that both these pages are 100% human-written, authored by an expert (me), well-referenced, and definitely helpful, they lost nearly all the keywords they were ranking for, with their rankings plummeting into nothingness overnight.
The one about mimosa, in particular, is buried under at least 40–50 e-commerce sites selling mimosa root bark powder and similar products. Pages with no information, no authors, no helpfulness, and often just no content whatsoever.
Apparently, e-commerces and user-generated content platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Quora are experiencing the greatest boost in traffic, as most search results tend to favor these websites over anything else. So, what’s happening here?
Analyzing the Update — How Does That Work in Practice?
Let’s list a few known facts that could shed some light over an otherwise quite opaque transformation of the search engine results (SERPs).
According to Google, the HCU is “entirely automated, using a machine-learning model,” meaning that no human raters are involved this time.
So, until the new “Hidden Gems” update is rolled out, there’s no way it can truly identify good, human-made content besides running a few scripts with a set of rules that define “good” and “bad” sites.
Apparently, the whole core update revolves around content only, so no backlinks should change things in any way.
Although evidence about this is mostly anecdotal (and as many SEO experts will tell you, if a website has been hit, no backlinks can save it), there are some facts that can prove this claim.
Some people conducted tests and tried to delete all content from a page, which led to a surprising result: the page recovered all its rankings.
However, this trick didn’t work for long, and after a while, the rankings plummeted again. In any case, this test might prove that what is sending a signal to Google’s new algorithm is content, and content alone.
Also, Google confirmed that the HCU is just a penalty, so websites that are performing better after its roll out are simply those that are less affected by it.
In simpler terms, if the HCU score is not high enough, the website will just be penalized, and right now, ranking has become a race where the best one is the one who’s less penalized.
Lastly, they explained “the system generates a site-wide signal,” which means that the pages are not simply evaluated as single entities, but a site-wide score is applied over the entire site.
This means that if this HCU score is too low, even a great page may underperform if the website hosting it is not good enough.
What’s more important, is that all the theories about “improving the overall quality of a website” by adding author bios, proper sources, and user-generated reviews are apprently just that: theories.
The practice, after some expert SEOs tried to test out the results, is that all these pieces of advice are quite useless.
Despite the “purge” of parasite AI-written pages that occurred in March/April 2024, a ton of great pages written by experts are ranking far, far below useless and unhelpful pages like Reddit forums, random Quora answers, and lots and lots of e-commerces.
A solid explanation is that Google is giving a lot more importance to returning visitors and navigational queries. Google now gives, in fact, a lot of importance to properly naming your site.
This means that websites that have a powerful brand behind them naturally attract a significant amount of navigational queries, while a smaller, independent one, obviously doesn’t.
Similarly, websites where discussions occur (such as Quora), tend to have a huge amount of returning visitors traffic, giving these websites a significant boost over the others.
Is there any definitive evidence of this? Obviously not, but there’s some relevant proof that this may be the case after the successful results of some groups which employed CTR manipulation to boost the results of test websites.
And why are e-commerces ranking so well, then? A possible explanation is that they qualify very well for both navigational queries, since they’re branded shops, and for returning visitors, since people often check a product several times before buying it.
It may also be due to the fact that Google’s resources to re-crawl the entire Internet with a new AI algorithm are somewhat limited, so the “e-commerce” website category has not been involved in the HCU update, at least not yet.
Following this theory, larger “trusted” websites with a high domain authority (say, 70–80+) may have been kept out of the update entirely. This could be the reason why the rankings of some web behemoths have remained completely stable after the updates.
The Unfair Consequences of the Google 2024 Update
One of the worst, most appalling consequences of this update, is that all previously established rules and best practices have changed, but penalties are being applied retroactively since the penalty is site-wide.
What was “good SEO” so far isn’t good anymore, and that could be fine if new content won’t rank unless it adheres to the new rules. What is not fine instead, is that from all we can guess, websites received huge penalties for all the content they published now, or in the past.
Let’s say your website has been tracked down by the update, and it is old enough to have two thousand pages that were perfectly optimized according to old SEO rules.
There’s a huge chance that these pages will now be labeled as “unhelpful content”, meaning that your website is pretty much dead in the water. The site-wide HCU penalty will be applied everywhere, even to your newer, better pages you’re going to publish.
It would be an inhumane effort to try to correct the content from two thousand pages. And if you simply decide to remove so much content by deleting most pages, your website will certainly lose the vast majority of its backlinks connected to them, and your hard-earned authority will be gone.
Over time, you will keep falling down and down, since it seems that an undisclosed, yet significant portion of what defines a content “helpful” is the amount of navigational queries and returning visitors coming to the website.
But if your website lost most of its positions, a vicious cycle will prevent you from recovering. Every other page will end up attracting a much smaller number of people to it, further reducing the amount of returning visitors.
In practice, you have no way to recover. And if your livelihood depended on that website, well, it’s time to find yourself a new job.
As a popular song says, “You’re dead and out of this world,” because if your site can’t be seen, it’s like your brand never existed in the first place, so goodbye navigational queries and goodbye authority.
This vicious cycle will force you to lose even more rankings, and with them, even more traffic, until the website is completely dead. Which is more or less the reason why so many people who got hit by the update couldn’t find any way to recover.
And that makes everything even more unfair to smaller sites, since gigantic ones with millions of viewers such as Quora or Reddit will still get enough signals to stay afloat and not be affected by the update, regardless of the quality of the individual pages.
Drawing a Line
To sum it up, the rules of the game have changed overnight, no one could reasonably guess that, and now what’s done is done.
Whether this update improved the life of users is highly questionable, at least in its current state of things.
While it may have helped rooting out some rotten apples, the price paid is the death of countless genuinely helpful blogs, which is by all means not a good thing, even from a human perspective.
How fair is that for the hundreds of thousands of people who made a living out of their blogs and who have now been thrown under the bus after losing 95% of their traffic in a single week?
There are huge hidden socioeconomic consequences for countless of households that will be affected by this change. Yet, very little in terms of responsibilities when all we need is to say that “Google algorithms are highly volatile, you knew that from the start.”
That’s one of the reasons why monopolies always are a bad, bad thing.
