HCU Recovery
My personal site being affected by Google's helpful content update was an excellent opportunity to review, and execute a full recovery.
Google's helpful content update in 2023 wiped out a lot of personal websites, including my own hobby site, SIMRACINGCOCKPIT.gg. Traffic was down some 60% which made the site not worth the effort, financially.
Rather than waiting for an algorithm update to make things right, I elected to act and use the process as a learning opportunity.
My instinct was to move the domain and make a fresh start. Prior to the domain migration, I carried out a lot of work to make sure that each article added great value and critically, answered the intent of the search queries that were driving traffic.
Articles with detailed, indepth content with unique photos and screenshots continued to rank well after the HCU update, so there was an obvious template for me to follow. Articles that had recieved a lot of research and effort and demonstrated first hand experience performed well throughout, where the content that has less depth had started to perform poorly.
It's hard to articulate what "genuine / first hand experience" actually is without going down the usual lexicon of 'build great content'. Google may assess a page or site and log a calculation called "effortScore" - I used a similar methodology with a quick AI tool I built in Replit to evaluate each page to assist me in remedying any shortcomings.
Generally speaking, pages that had high impressions, but a low CTR were likely candidates for a refresh or removal.
Prior to the migration, I carried out some housekeeping duties including a log file analysis, realigning the best of the inbound external links, and other SEO audit based items such as internal linking that would likely give me a better picture of any technical issues plaguing the site. I also implemented a more topic orientated architecture, identifying key topic hub pages around the site.
The impact was reasonably immediate. Traffic levels returned to pre HCU levels and, thankfully it has had no further algorithmic penalties.
There were so many important takeaways from the exercise that revealed just how SEO has changed in the past 12 months.