What Needs To Be Understood About The HCU
It needs to be understood that there is literally no way to claim with 100% certainty that the HCU is the reason why any given site lost rankings during a core algorithm update. There is no way to isolate the effects of the HCU signals from the hundreds or thousands of other signals.
Except for when Google’s update announcement specifically mentions one of the components, but even then it’s important to identify the effects on the site instead of shrugging and declaring it’s the HCU. That’s an excuse, not a diagnosis.
How To Diagnose Effects Of HCU
Google recommends reading their documentation about all the signals for helpful “people-first” content in order to understand the effects of HCU related issues. People-first means content that is not search-engine first.
The documentation says:
“Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results. This page is designed to help creators evaluate if they’re producing such content.”
Google’s documentation on people-first content recommends the following topics for debugging ranking issues:
Content and quality
Expertise
Page experience
People-first content
Search engine-first content
Google’s documentation goes on to say that after identifying relevant web pages, other signals are applied to check if the content exhibit “aspects” of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT).
“After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T.
Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them. For example, some content might be helpful based on the experience it demonstrates, while other content might be helpful because of the expertise it shares.”
Takeaway
The takeaway from Google’s documentation about people-first content is that there are multiple components to what HCU is. People-first content is super important, especially because it’s the standard SEO practice to create search-engine first content by starting with top ranked keywords, organizing site architecture around keywords, and generally optimizing for keywords and not for people. For more on that topic read: A Candid Assessment Of AI Search & SEO
Google’s People-First Documentation
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
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