June 2025 Core Update – HCU sites are recovering but TOO early to say anything

written by Gagan Ghotra

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Google is now rolling out June 2025 core update and some SEOs been reporting that sites hit by Helpful Content Update (Sep 2023) are recovering partially? But I think that its too early to say anything.

HCU wasn’t a usual update and how it hit the sites (even the good ones)! makes it a sort of beast algorithm update rather than being a normal core update or something. But its cool that some site owners who were devastated by HCU and almost all of their Google Search traffic lost over night are now seeing some light, ranking improving for their sites.

I think that its too early to say anything given even last year after August 2024 Core Update there were significant reversals of ranking improvements for sites, which during the rollout of update saw improvement. That’s why back in Sep 2024 I wrote this post “I still think that NO ONE can recover a site hit by HCU” and before that even said “NO ONE knows what Helpful Content Update is & How to recover?”

And still in July 2025 my stand and theory is same! NO SEO actually understand what the heck helpful content update was? + how to recover. That’s why yesterday on X I wrote this.

X post from me (Gagan Ghotra) saying Important point about some recoveries of HCU sites cuz of June 2025 Core Update - most that I'm aware of and are seeing some improvements did NOT do any sort of changes to their sites and just continues to publish at lesser frequency since getting hit in Sep 2023. If those are recovering its Google's algorithm which improved and now can identify better content in a better way -> therefore rewarding it. Rather than it having to do anything with any SEO strategy or tactic which those sites implemented.

And based upon the SEO wartime group that I worked in! back in Sep 2023 and some months after that where me and couple of other SEOs ran 10s of tests to recover 76 different publishers which were hit really hard.

My best theory about HCU is Google giving up on identifying, processing and then applying page level “Expertise” to the rankings. And moving it to the site level. Which made it such that which domain a piece of content is matters more than what that piece of content is. Which means same content on my domain is unhelpful but once its on like Forbes or any other already large + authoritative domain.

I think once HCU affected sites start to recover that sort of means Google is adjusting the domain level signals and sort of valuing more what’s on the page rather than which domain that page is on. But this is just my guess and theory (I might be totally wrong about this though).

Anyway about HCU theory! I’m hoping for the best and wishing that HCU affected site owners start to recover & get traffic from Google. June 2025 Core Update is still rolling out and will most likely be done on 21th July. Let’s see what happens!!

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