Ahrefs Evolve conference is going on in Singapore and many SEOs are doing presentations over there. Thought I’m not there personally but I’ve been watching what people attending are posting on X.
Anyway coming back to topic of the importance – Helpful Content Update (HCU).
Last year in September Google rolled out Helpful Content Update which affected manyĀ small/independent sitesĀ and they were absolutely demolished in Googleās Search Results and lost a lot of organic traffic. Even after months of the update rolloutĀ no site have recoveredĀ to ranking levels which they were at before September 2023.
While there were someĀ theoriesĀ around what happened with Helpful Content Update or why these sites got hit butĀ I think that there was not something concrete enoughĀ to say that a site is hit because of these reasons.
Its been almost a year since this happened and yet no one exactly know what HCU is? and how to recover. The weirdest thing for me is that despite this being so big issues for site owners – literally no one has done any presentation about it in a conference. WEIRD!!!
Probably no one actually know or have actually recovered any site hit by HCU??
Even though there are some claims out there!!!
But just for speaking out about it and specifically focusing his presentation on HCU I respect Cyrus Shepard š
Even though I exactly don’t know if his work with any HCU affected site have lead to recovery but its still amazing that at least someone is highlighting the concern of affected site owners. While most of SEO industry sit stills and in some cases sides with Google too.
Anyway here are some interesting tweets from Cyrus’s presentation. I personally wasn’t there at conference in Singapore but got to see some interesting points in his slides which were posted on X by people attending the conference.
Also I don’t know if Cyrus will be putting out slides that he presented. But he do I will add link to that here.
And my grind to figure out what Google exactly is considering Helpful and how they are assessing helpfulness of web pages continues ……….
Still my grind to build a good hypothesis around what Google exactly considering Helpful continues but will not claim anything unless I have applied hypothesis across many sites + have seen significant improvement in rankings.
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) October 24, 2024
Because that's where real unlock in terms of businessā¦ pic.twitter.com/mA4VKAGWg5
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