The past year has been a rollercoaster for publishers navigating an increasingly crowded web. With competition rising and AI shaking up search results, staying on top of rankings is no small feat – especially in light of Google’s constant updates.
This includes the helpful content update (HCU), which has left many sites struggling to recover from traffic drops and ranking tumbles.
Having experienced this, I’ve learned there’s no one-size-fits-all fix. But we can bounce back by making strategic changes. Here’s how I did it – and what other publishers can learn from the journey.
Dealing with Google’s HCU
I know, I know: Google doesn’t like us to call it the helpful content update anymore. It’s all been baked into search and is just a part of the core! 🎶
The whole thing is a system update, regularly weighting and reinterpreting the various signals.
But the HCU has made life complicated for so many, tumbling rankings, decimating traffic and sending some sites to a tear-filled graveyard replaced with grief, frustration and the feeling that Google just doesn’t care.
I’m no stan for Google and genuinely believe the search giant has made some mistakes. But I’m also not someone who will stand by and do nothing. It’s just not how I’m built.
During last year’s September 2023 helpful content update, my Australian technology website Pickr encountered a new problem. It fell in ranking severely as the HCU rolled out. Like many, I was frustrated, but I wasn’t going to sit and wait.
I tried many things. I pushed out an update I had been working on with more speed. I tried more things. I did research and experimented. I tried a few more things and I took notes.
The March 2024 update came and went, and more falls arrived. Alongside the rest of the affected publisher community, I felt like I was being punished, so I experimented some more.
Notes, trials and tests later, the August 2024 update arrived and the response was immediate: from the first day, my site bounced back.
I had the makings of an HCU recovery. It was a partial recovery, sure, resetting things back to life before the March 2024 update, but it was something.
I’m not sure I’ll ever see a return to the immense traffic from before September 2023, largely because the landscape has changed and the algorithm with it. But I’m hopeful of continued improvement, largely because some of my work appears to be working.
It hasn’t stopped, either. In the spirit of “if you know, you know,” feel free to punch Pickr in your friendly neighborhood tracking tool and see if there’s a recovery.
Simply put, see if my work has worked. I’ll start.
When everything was tallied, I ended up doing dozens of things to improve my site, hoping to make it more helpful.
There wasn’t just one thing that made the most impact, but lots of little things added up to a bigger picture.
While some were specific to my own site, the good news is I’m fairly sure some of it can be repeated for any site.
Publishers can learn from my wins and hopefully see their own by the time the next update rolls around.
It just might require a change in thinking about what the HCU means for them.
1. Take a hard, introspective look your content
A big lesson I’ve learned working in SEO is about doing regular content and page audits. It is beneficial to work out whether what you’re serving is actually good.
Nearly every site owner I speak to seems to believe their work is good. They have a lot of it, some have performed well, and they believe it’s fine. Surely it’s Google’s mistake, right?
The problem is in how you think about your site versus that of others. Your content could be good.
But you also don’t know how good your competitors’ content is. Since Google compares everything, it’s safe to assume your content might not be good enough to compete.
Think about your content realistically. You probably weren’t always an award-winning writer, nor was your team.
You may not have always had the best content, subheads and understanding of a topic.
Your content might also lack a solid linking structure, by which I mean including great internal links, useful external links attributing information other sources have provided and solid context for those links.
In many of the sites I’ve worked on as an SEO specialist, the content balance was a big hurdle.
Simply put, there were a lot of pages everyone was proud of, but no one could wholeheartedly say all of the content was amazing.
It was more like maybe 10–20% were great, and the remainder was, well – not.
Thin, garbage or just plain “meh.” The vibe was clear: we were proud of some, but not everything.
If you have 100 pages, that’s a problem because 10 to 20 are great and the remaining 80 less so.
That problem gets significantly worse as your page count increases.
I spoke to a publisher with 15,000 pages the other week, and I’d have a hard time calling even 10% of what I saw great.
Let’s say Google is looking at everything you submit and attempting to understand your site from that body of work.
Do you feel confident knowing that maybe 10% of what you submit is worthwhile and properly representative of being the best in the category?
This is content that hurts. It may as well come from the “hurtful content update,” but we can also remedy it by conducting an audit.
They’re long, extensive and can be exhausting for both of those reasons.
However, they are also beneficial because you may find content that no longer represents your brand or site. If this happens, you can delete it or simply remove it from the index.
Be critical about what could be hurting you. It could just save your site.
2. Find ways to be more helpful or even useful
While we’re on the subject of being overly critical of your content, let’s consider what the helpful content update was supposed to represent.
Ignoring how unhelpful the update has largely been, Google told everyone that it built the HCU with the sole purpose of being “helpful,” so consider where your site can improve its helpfulness.
It’s ridiculous, I know, but our websites aren’t always helpful, even if we’re trying to be.
They may exist to inform and entertain, but that doesn’t mean they’ll match a definition of “help.”
These aspects are not mutually exclusive, and Google is trying to build a formulaic approach to establishing what “helpful” could mean.
Part of the problem is Google is incredibly ambiguous about the helpful content update.
What even is helpful content? How do you define it when Google is cagey about the concept and won’t properly define it?
If anything, this should have been called the “useful content update,” a name that is just about as ambiguous but at least explains what you’re looking for.
I can’t figure out how to grade helpful content, but useful content makes a lot more sense. I can look at a page and decide what to remove and how to improve the whole thing.
Ask yourself if the elements in each article, post and page are genuinely serving a purpose for users.
Regardless of whether the content is helpful, what can you change to make the experience more useful for all?
Can you add a table of contents?
Are your subheads easy to read and follow a standard order?
Are there things you can do to automatically improve your pages?
Do forward facing indexed tag or category pages have a use on your website?
Can you add descriptions to make these pages better?
What else can you do to improve the usefulness of your website?
Do those things and do them fast. The next update could be just around the corner, and you need to be ready.
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3. Be transparent and don’t lie
And while you’re at it, try not to lie. Depending on how well you know your site, you may be doing it without realizing it.
Not lying is a great message for life. Being truthful generally makes life easier for most because you don’t need to think whether you’ll catch yourself in the act of being deceptive.
The same is true when it comes to Google. Don’t lie to Google because it can work things out quickly.
When I say “don’t lie to Google,” I’m specifically talking about nonsensical updates that are incredibly easy for a comparative search engine to debunk.
Call this the “honest content update,” because search engines thrive on honesty and transparency, like most things in life.
Oh, you said you updated the freshness of an article or page, but the only change was the sitemap’s date?