I have to write this – recently I have been noticing a lot of mentions of HCU and How to recover. But I’ve came to found that no one knows
- What this actually is? What really Helpful Content Update or system or process is?
- Why any site suddenly was put in the jail of HCU in September 2023?
- Why sites which lost almost all of their visibility with HCU are now recovering with August Core Update? Is the same content which was deemed to be un helpful by Google last year – is that now helpful?
- Does Google ACTUALLY know what is Helpful Content or they just named it as Helpful Content Update for PR reasons?
- Is Google actually understands what is Helpful and rank content accordingly?
- Is Helpfulness can be generalised like a single page can be helpful for me but not at all helpful for someone else? How does Google is handling this while ranking the pages?
- Is word “Helpful Content” or “Helpful Content System” are just distraction words and there is something else which Google is looking at or considering?
Here are some of my recent tweets about Helpful Content Update 👇
This content is from one of my recent Tweet
As I said last year – Google can’t figure out what is helpful but they may say it’s a Helpful Content System. A page may be helpful for me but not for you. Generalising just that as a signal is challenge because it may end up presenting what you consider helpful to me BUT what I consider as helpful for me is totally different thing.
I think that HCU signal went after intent of creation of a site (SEP 2023) and with August Core Update they changed primarily to go after “intent of a page creation”.
If this identifies a page to be created with the intent of primarily being shown in Discover – that page will most likely get some negative boost.
And some SEOs/publishers may say that we’re not writing just for Discover BUT actually they are – if not then why selecting certain type of featured images & headlines & sentence structure.
I have many sites which got zeroed out from Discover after the roll out of August Core Update started and since then we have been testing changing the structure of content on new pages which different publisher teams are writing.
Still not much success but initial testing suggests that Google NOW has the same HCU like signal and is being used to identify if the page is created with primary purpose shown in Discover.
But it’s a real fast signal in identifying intent of a page creation & applying that demotion signal to the page – which don’t let that page get more visibility in Discover.
And probably as Google mentioned in March – “…. become part of our core ranking systems …..” perhaps during the process of crawling/indexing/ranking they know that primarily this page was created for this specific Google surface and we need to handle it accordingly to not let manipulation of our systems.
Still a theory but as usual will be testing more 🙂
Looking Forward
- I’ve been trying my best to get answers out of Google on X but they have never replied, I wish they do but I’ve tried so many times so I just gave up!
- I think that other SEOs who have far bigger voice than me on X or otherwise should have or should in the future question Google more specifically around the terminology which they propose?
I do remember when Google first released Helpful Content Update in August 2022 most SEOs on X went after Niche site community saying that their over SEO optimised content will now be hammered by Google or they have been ruining search results creating content for ranking only. There was a lot of brou haha about Niche guys on X back then and SEOs were like now the end of you is coming and that did kind of happened in September 2023 when Google updated the HCU classifier. Insane number of niche sites lost all of their rankings.
I wish instead of going after Niche community – SEOs should have questioned Google itself?
- As I documented in this recent article many publishers have totally lost their visibility in Google Discover post 15th August when Google started to roll out the core update, this happened for some sites even after being aligned with Google’s Guidelines.
I’m not sure what’s going on with this?
I’ve been told by many SEOs from Europe that their publisher clients have also lost visibility in Google Discover due to August Core Update?
So far from my personal experience of using Google Discover it seems that post start of August Core Update Google is favouring & boosting visibility of bigger publishers a lot in Discover.
Will that continue – I’m not sure or can’t say anything about it?
What will happen to those small to medium size publishers who have lost visibility in Google Discover? Probably they need to make some cuts in how many people they are employing.
- I expect that a Spam Update will be rolled out and August Core Update is done rolling out as I was writing this article early in the morning Melbourne | Australia time.
Again need to wait and see if this correct things for publishers in Discover or not?
- Let’s see what happens – who knows what future of Google Search is?
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