(Sep 2025) Looking back on Helpful Content Update (HCU)

written by Gagan Ghotra

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From my recent podcast with Edward Strum!

On Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) & Algorithmic Changes

  • An “Editorial Choice,” Not Just a Content Filter: Gagan Ghotra argues the September 2023 update was less about the helpfulness of individual content pieces and more of an “editorial decision” by Google to shape how the entire web should look.
  • Good Publishers Were Collateral Damage: Both speakers agree that while the update targeted low-quality, “fluffy,” and programmatic SEO sites, it also negatively impacted many legitimate publishers who were not engaging in bad practices. Gagan estimates as many as 30% of affected sites were “right people” caught in the crossfire.
  • The Rise of UGC as a Replacement: The content that was demoted was largely replaced by User-Generated Content (UGC) from platforms like Reddit, which Google now perceives as more authentic and to the point.
  • The “Tag of Death”: The update acted like a permanent tag on entire domains. Once a site was hit, no amount of content removal, theme changes, or internal linking adjustments seemed to lead to recovery, suggesting a domain-level penalty.
  • Motivation Was Competition: Edward Sturm suggests the drastic nature of the update was a direct response to the competitive threat from ChatGPT. Google was “freaking out” and needed to make a significant move to improve its search quality.

On SEO & Content Strategy in the Current Climate

  • Shift from Topical Authority to Topical Visibility: Gagan emphasizes that building a business is now more about “topical visibility” across multiple platforms (like TikTok) rather than just “topical authority” on a single website. Businesses can gain leads and customers on social platforms before ever investing heavily in traditional SEO.
  • SEO is Potentially Easier Now: With many smaller publishers and niche sites wiped out, Edward Sturm posits that there is less competition, making it potentially easier for new, high-quality sites to rank and get noticed.
  • Multi-Channel Presence is Crucial: The speakers agree that relying on a single channel is a mistake. A strong presence on social media not only diversifies traffic but also builds brand signals that can indirectly benefit SEO.
  • Press Releases as an AI Manipulation Tactic: Edward Sturm views using press releases to influence AI Overviews as a legitimate, “white-hat” strategy. It involves creating factual, positive announcements about a company, which AI can then cite.

On Spam, AI, and the Future

  • Parasite SEO Will Continue: Gagan believes that spam tactics like parasite SEO will persist because Google’s focus is currently on developing its AI products (like AI Overviews) rather than dedicating massive resources to fighting spam.
  • Google Needs Publishers for AI: For AI Overviews to function, Google needs a source of original, quality content. This has led to partnerships with major publishers, creating a system where a few large players feed the AI, potentially squeezing out smaller independent creators.

We discussed this from 01:10:12 – 01:34:04 in the video below!

Here is the full transcript of what we discussed from 01:10:12 – 01:34:04!

Gagan Ghotra
which is not happening anytime soon, and we want to put more resources into controlling these kinds of spam practices. So, I don’t know, even last year, when the March 2024 core update rolled out, there was a lot of expired domains that got burned to the ground within weeks. And I was like, oh my god, Google figured out something.
With the March update, there must be something in the algorithm which is able to detect this, and it is happening so quickly. And by August, I was like, no, there was nothing. They may have figured out something, but maybe it was artificial that they got a list of the domains and they were like, yeah, we’re going to hammer all these domains in search results.
And there was no algorithmic part where they can sort of detect the changes quickly and remove the domain from search results. So, I think parasite SEO and all that, the jazz that we just discussed, it’s going to continue because Google is… all their focus is AI overviews, AI mode, and all the other other features that they are trying to introduce around AI. But let’s see. I don’t recommend anyone doing this, but if you just want to have SEO fun, yes, do it.

Edward Sturm
But don’t do it for your clients. That’s my recommendation.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah, definitely.

Edward Sturm
If the pattern suddenly changes, Google doesn’t like abrupt pattern changes. It’s… oh, something must be wrong when there’s an abrupt pattern change. No one likes that. That is really interesting that people are doing that and they’re just burning them to the ground; they’re getting away with it for several months, and then they go and buy a new domain that governments link to. It’s… yeah, I think that’s… yeah.

Gagan Ghotra
That’s… I think one of the challenges with Google is the scale of the things. There are thousands of domains that they are trying to process and everything else. And you cannot have a system which is absolutely perfect. So, there will always be scope to sort of do some things which can lead to manipulation of these systems, and you can try to make them favorable to you. You mentioned Harpreet earlier; he did press releases and everything else. And then AI Overviews was saying that his company is the best one. So, that is also parasite SEO.

Edward Sturm
I actually think so fun fact, I think that press release tactic, I think that’s a great tactic that won’t go away anytime soon. The press release AI manipulation tactic, because if you really think about it, there’s not much that’s black hat about it. Putting out a press release announcing why your company is great—that’s not black hat. Sharing testimonials in your press release—that’s not black hat. And AI Overviews citing the press release—that’s not black hat. AI Overviews needs content to cite. I think it’s just a good way and a smart way to influence AI to talk about your company and say the things that you want to be said about your company.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah, of course. And the problem with these kinds of things is what I’ve observed over the years is that if any tactic becomes a point of conversation in the SEO industry, then Google tries to do something to control that. Earlier, as you mentioned with the niche site lady back in 2021-2022, there were these whole groups around creating niche sites, having a specific format on the pages, doing keyword-rich content, trying to optimize it for Google search, and making money out of it. And frankly, there is nothing wrong with trying to make money using any tactic. But what happened over time is so many people were doing it that it created a blob of sites which looked similar to each other, and Google doesn’t want that. I think this was the… yeah, this was the helpful content update, and that destroyed all those sites.

And I think the same is happening with programmatic SEO right now.

So most of the brands, they have a page, they have a structure of the content, and they are publishing it.

So from Google’s perspective, everything is becoming the same.

And that is what they don’t want. Because if everything is the same, then they have to do minor checks on each point and see that, okay, this is 1.2, this is 1.3. But if they hammer the whole programmatic SEO pages and the whole sector, then they get new types of pages, new sites coming along, and then they have more distinguishing pages which are easy to process and they can be like, yeah, this is how we can rank pages easier right now compared to what it was earlier.

And I think that’s why they hammered all those niche sites as well, that they wanted to set an example that we don’t want the same things on the web, same structure, same strategies, or things along those lines.

I think a lot of that content was just bad as well.

Do you… the helpful content update was rolled out in parts; it was not just one thing. So what they tried to do is, I think they started in 2022 with a site-wide signal where they were saying that we will introduce a site-wide signal which will look at all your content, and based upon how much unhelpful content you have on your pages, it’s going to down rank even your helpful pages as well.

So it was like, all four were like, oh, I need to do something about my unhelpful pages because it’s going to impact the ranking of my helpful content that I have on my site. That did not have much of a broad impact. And then they did another update, I think that was in December or something. But what happened over time is, I don’t know what they did in September 2023.

That’s when the bloodbath started.

Yeah, right. I still remember, I was supposed to head to my sister’s marriage in November. And because at that time we used to work with tens of publishers.

Our client portfolio was mostly publishers, but right now it’s flipped.

Right now it’s mostly e-commerce sites and publishers are a minor part of that.

And then many publishers were getting hit, and I was up at 2:00 a.m. doing meetings with the UK, from London, and then at 4:00 a.m., someone from France is calling me, and then at 7:00 a.m. my local Melbourne time, I’m doing a meeting with someone from New York, and they are like, what’s happening? These were not niche sites, like one or two people, these were…

Edward Sturm
So, let me ask you, why do you believe that those sites—these publishers who weren’t copying the standard format of the sites that the HCU was trying to hit—why were those sites hit?

Gagan Ghotra
I think they just got caught in the broad hammer that Google sort of pushed forward. So, Google’s goal was trying to control certain things that the new site community…

Edward Sturm
I have a crazy belief about that. I actually think that was where we started to see a lot of UGC getting prioritized and straight publishers getting devalued as well.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah. But what I have learned over the years right now is that the helpful content update was not actually about the content. There was something else.

I think there might have been an algorithm change which is not related to content on the page or content on the site overall. It was something else, and maybe some Google product manager or someone else came up with the idea that, oh, this algorithm should be named as “helpful content update” for some reason.

But actually, it’s not looking at the content. That is my biggest conspiracy theory.

Edward Sturm
No, go more, go deeper into this. I want to hear this.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah. So I’ll tell you another story that I’ve never sort of talked about publicly. In September 2023 when the update hit, 14 sites which were our clients, each site was employing 20 to 30 people, some were 50, 60 people. So not like the usual niche site where one or two people are working on it, yeah. These were really big publishers with audiences, like national audiences in the UK. You are really big in France in French content, you are really big in Portugal with Portuguese content, you are really big in Japan with just Japanese content, and you’re just getting hit. Like overnight, you are losing the traffic.

And then what I did is I talked with certain SEOs from the UK, some from San Francisco, and some from New Delhi in India, and some from Sydney. So what we tried to do is we formed a group. We were seven of us, and their names are still not public, and I think they don’t want to be public, but we got 78 sites in our group. So seven of us were working on 78 publishers, because everyone was reaching out to SEOs trying to figure out what the fuck is happening. We ran so many experiments on those 78 sites from October 2023 to mid-February, March, and nothing was working.

Edward Sturm
And that’s when we came to the conclusion that… That’s what Lars said. Lars Løfgren, maybe you know him, he came on the podcast and he was like, it’s an actual tag. The HCU was like a tag to a site where everything is getting devalued.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah. And that’s what we observed. On 78 sites, we removed content, we merged content, we removed internal links, we created internal links, we changed the whole themes because we had whole control on the site.

Because everyone was like, “I lost my traffic, there’s nothing, do whatever.”

So we had WordPress developers and they were making changes within days and making it live and testing it for three weeks, then running the same test on other sites. And we did it across 78 sites, and nothing was working. No change was working. And that’s when we came to the conclusion that it’s not about the content on the pages.

There is something going on at the domain level where Google is like, “I hate this domain.”

Edward Sturm
So do you have theories as to why Google hated these domains?

Gagan Ghotra
So far, I have not exactly figured out what went wrong, why they made that assumption. And I do have some conspiracy that maybe they tried to do a manual review and made a list of domains that they were like, “We just want them out of the search results.” That might be one thing.

Edward Sturm
So wait, you’re saying the sites that you were consulting in SEO were getting manually reviewed and then hit by Google?

Gagan Ghotra
Yes, that’s what my conspiracy is.

Edward Sturm
But so okay, so let me ask you this, why might Google not like one of these sites?

Gagan Ghotra
I have no clear answer to that. But from my perspective, what they might be looking at is: do these sites have a broad brand, a really big brand or not?

Edward Sturm
Because that was a broad pattern across the 78 sites that we’re talking about publishers. These publishers, you’re saying, didn’t have big brands.

Gagan Ghotra
Yes, they were known, but they were not as known as, like, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

Edward Sturm
That’s interesting. Because you know, some SEO tools put in brand signal metrics around that time.

Gagan Ghotra
That is bullshit. Total bullshit.

Edward Sturm
Well, I’ve never given any credence to these brand signal tools. I’ve never found them to be valuable. But I think it’s interesting how SEO tools put them in around the same time.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah. I have called out many of these tools and their metrics as well.

Edward Sturm
The brand signal tools are garbage. Let me ask you, anyone that you worked with, did they have theories as to why these sites were hit?

Gagan Ghotra
I think what everyone in our group who was working on these sites, we came to a conclusion that maybe it’s an editorial choice from Google around how they want the web to go forward. It was not about promoting helpful content or demoting it.

Edward Sturm
It makes sense. To me, it’s possible because people could have been… so when I started making SEO content that went viral on Instagram and TikTok, I saw the same comments from people, which is that SEOs ruined the web. And people complained about the same things. They complained about a lot of fluff in articles, they complained about affiliate articles that were influenced by money. They complained about… yeah, basically those two things were the biggest things, especially the fluff. And a lot of smaller, a lot of small blogs, they have this habit of using a ridiculous amount of fluff and not giving the answers very fast.

I mean, I remember I looked at this a good amount, and I also wondered, is any of this due to just that these are all publishers targeting the top of the funnel? And I understand people said it’s a tag, but I also wondered if one of these publishers put up a standard product page targeting a bottom-of-funnel keyword with a product page layout, you have the image on the side, you have the H1, and then under that, you actually give people what they want right away, and then you have a call-to-action button, and it’s 400 words and that’s it. And you’re targeting a bottom-of-funnel keyword really precisely, putting it in the page title, URL slug, meta description, H1, beginning of the first sentence. I wonder…

Gagan Ghotra
I think what we think right now is that the September helpful content update was more of an editorial decision from Google around how the editorial of the whole web should look.

So before that, for years, it was all right to write content. You can have 20 to 30 people in your team, you write content about whatever you are interested in, you might be interested in car reviews or something like that. Watches was one of the examples.

We had someone who is actually a really well-known person to be a watches influencer on Instagram. I don’t wear watches, but that guy is the number one known guy in the country to have crazy watches, like 10k, 20k. So his…

Edward Sturm
So what replaced this content? The sites that got hit.

Gagan Ghotra
Reddit.

Edward Sturm
That’s what I’m saying! Because what’s… like, actually think about what Reddit is compared to what these articles were. These articles were long, they were fluff, they gave shallow… a lot of them gave shallow answers, or the answers were distributed throughout the article so you just had to read all of this stuff. Reddit, it’s… and oh, these publishers take money to recommend products. Reddit, like you said, authentic, to the point, fast, right there, UGC.

Gagan Ghotra
Yeah. But the problem with this is that that’s why I’m saying Google made an editorial decision around how they want the web to be. Because what you described is fluff, bad SEO practices, that was 70%, almost 70% max, I think, of the type of sites that were hit with the September helpful content update. But 30% who were hit, they were not doing those practices. They were just people sharing their actual experience, authentic people, authentic publishers.

Edward Sturm
They also got… so you’re saying there were small bloggers that were caught in the crossfire.

Gagan Ghotra
Yes, small to medium-sized. And the number of those guys is really, really high. It’s not like one in 100, it’s almost like 30 in 100. So, 70 of those guys deserved to get hit because they have been doing all this fluffy content, keyword stuffing and everything else.

But what about the 30 people? So Google made an editorial choice around how they want the web to look, and they were like, we are okay with killing 30 right people because we want the web to look like this. So that was, I think, a mistake from Google’s side. They should have been more careful around doing the update and they should have considered these edge cases, that they want those people to survive.

And then I had a meeting with my friend from Sydney and he was like, do you think that Google had an internal meeting where they already knew that if they roll out this update, 30 right people, 30% of right sites will get hit?

Gagan Ghotra
And I was like, probably they had that data. What do you think? Do you think that before rolling out the update…

Edward Sturm
It’s totally possible. It’s totally possible. Yeah. People were complaining. This was September, think about it. This was September 2023. ChatGPT was getting huge. It had come out in December 2022. Everyone’s saying ChatGPT is going to kill Google. Google internally is freaking out. They are losing their… they’re losing it. And they’re like, we need to make a drastic move. Maybe they had been thinking about this for a while too. And now it’s just like, we need to do some crazy things because we’re going to lose market share too fast. Maybe that was the fear because everyone was saying it and maybe they were really worried, and ChatGPT hadn’t even been out for a full year at that point. So, do I think they knew and they knew what they were doing? It’s totally possible. Completely possible, and you wanted to shape the web and also make Google search better because now they had a real competitor, which was generative AI. Generative AI was their first big competitor in forever.

Gagan Ghotra
I think so. Yeah. And also, once they have done that damage, then Reddit, of course, started to get up. YouTube also is getting pushed a lot right now. But then also, another question which came around to me last August, we were doing this editorial meeting with a publisher in the UK, and they were like, “What do you think around if Google wants AI Overviews to succeed, they need original content? It has to come from somewhere.” So, it’s almost like they have to keep some publishers alive who are writing those kinds of content.

Edward Sturm
And then I was like, maybe they will just do the partnerships, and that’s what exactly happened. Google is trying to do these partnerships with AP for Gemini content, and even they are negotiating partnerships with publishers in Australia to do direct content sourcing from them.

Gagan Ghotra
And then I was like, it’s going to be like few players who are sort of feeding the system, and Google will also have maybe some editorial team.

Edward Sturm
That’s what I’m saying, right? SEO is easier than ever because there’s less competitors. And I think if you wanted to start a new site now and then quickly… I mean, we’ve seen this time and time again from people who start new sites, and they’re quickly mentioned in AI Overviews, they’re mentioned in ChatGPT and Perplexity. That’s what I’m saying. SEO is extremely easy now.

Gagan Ghotra
Even when someone is asking me, like existing media groups, they are like, “We have these eight different websites across different verticals, and we want to create another one in this vertical.” And I was like, topical authority doesn’t matter to actually make money right now.

We live in a world where topical visibility is more important. You can go on TikTok, you can create content about whatever you’re interested in, and you can start to generate revenue compared to building your topical authority on, let’s say, Google or on your website.

And I sort of tried to test it with a few accountant friends from Melbourne. They were also like, “We want to get leads, high-quality leads for our local services.” And they were like, “We should create content on our website.” And I was like, “Does that actually matter? Maybe if you go on TikTok where the audience is already there, maybe that topical visibility—just you talking about your accounting services or whatever that is and explaining in detail the different things—maybe that will get you enough visibility to get your business going.” And that’s what exactly happened.

And then it’s all right. And even, I work with pool services businesses in Melbourne. They do pool cleaning and they can come to your house and do the cleaning of your pool and everything else.

They were like, “We want to build topical authority on Google and we want to rank higher.” And I was like, “Why do you want to rank higher? For almost all of your keywords, if anyone is putting them in, there are three to four ads at the top. So why do you want to spend so much resources trying to get there?” And instead, you can just do videos on TikTok and you can get going from there.

And I had an example of a pool care guy from, I think that’s what his name is, Pool Care Guy or something, from California. He does ASMR-style videos. He just puts the phone… when he’s doing the pool cleaning, and then he adds relaxing, soothing sound to it. I was like, “Maybe you should just copy-paste that guy.” And he just copy-pasted that and he’s getting crazy views right now. And he’s getting leads from that as well.

Edward Sturm
That’s great. It’s converting.

Gagan Ghotra
Converting, yeah. And I was like, yeah, you can just build your business or start your business out of topical visibility rather than trying to focus on topical authority and rank in Google search results.

But once you have the topical visibility, you have a proper business going, you have your P&L right, you are making money, then you can look into spending on SEO and trying to build that up as well as your channel, because don’t rely on one channel. That is the ultimate lesson in marketing. Even if you started from TikTok, you got your business going, you still should look into expanding to your website, of course, do SEO, Instagram as well.

Edward Sturm
Funny enough, that’s why I think, one of the reasons why I think that AI Invest was able to get this crazy spike with their AI-generated financial content. It’s because they were literally active across all social media platforms. They have an audience of 13.5 thousand followers on Instagram. They hired a real human news anchor who was open about the fact that he was hired just to give a human face to their AI-generated financial content. And so, funny enough, what you’re describing is also good for SEO.

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