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Recovery from the helpful content update IS possible

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It’s no secret that the helpful content update (HCU) which rolled out in September 2023 was quite a catastrophic update for many website owners. It appeared to mainly target content websites, i.e., websites particularly focused on publishing content and monetised through ads and affiliate links.

As of today, there are no reported cases of any recoveries from this update. However, we have successfully recovered 2 websites that lost practically ALL of their Google traffic following the HCU update.

I didn’t want to post this too soon but they have been recovered for over 3 months now. One has returned to traffic levels above those which it received before the HCU update, whilst the other website is at 60% of traffic, although this website is now much smaller than pre-update, so this was the expected traffic level at this stage.

What did we do? The reality is that after the update hit, it was obvious how things had changed in the results and feedback from Google engineers made it clear that the world has changed, the internet has changed and this is how it is now.

It took a deep assessment of what we had on the websites previously and aligning them to what Google now expects to rank. Listening to Google’s advice of “the internet has changed” is probably the best advice I could give to anyone that’s still struggling to recover their websites. Recovery is possible. Get in touch with us if you need some help with this!

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