The recent Google update has rattled a lot of websites, sending many to oblivion while keeping millions of websites perpetually out of visibility, scrambling to find ways to recover from the update to attract new users.
I’ve watched with complete sadness as many websites lose their livelihoods, due to this single update. And the saddest part is that most entrepreneurs have had to give up on their websites entirely.
If your website has recently been hit by the helpful content update then this is the good news you need to hear. There are actually some steps you can take to recover your website and start gaining traffic all over again.
In this guide, I’ll be sharing with you the practical steps that works, based on our case study with clients websites, alongside Google’s own recovery guide.
Review Google Search Console and Analytics
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One of the first steps you will take to recover a website from Google’s helpful content update is to evaluate your content to find out what exactly is going on.
Before then, you have to hop into your Google search console to check out your website performance. Analyze your traffic from here metrics, clicks and overall impressions over the last few weeks.
If there’s a huge disparity with what you have now over the last few months, you’ll know something needs to be done.
With the HCU, you may not necessarily get a manual action so you may not be sure if you’re undergoing any visibility restrictions or not, without having a good look at your traffic metrics.
Extend the evaluation to your Google Analytics. Find out traffic direction over the past few months. Identify the best performing web pages over the past months and consider their current performance over the recent weeks.
Where you notice significant changes in traffic to a web page, this should point you to specific content and pages that have been impacted the most.
PS: While HCU update creates a domain wide impact on a website, reviewing individual pages will give you a better idea on what pages are mostly impacted by this update.
Evaluate your Content
After your search console and analytics, you want to delve in further to evaluate your content so you can proffer a pathway to recovery from the helpful content update.
At this stage, make a proper review of your existing content, based on the data you recovered from step one above. What exactly could have been wrong with those pages with very low or zero traffic?
Analyze the creation process for those pieces of content and the page itself. Could you say that the content was valuable? Did it add real value to your readers or it was just a collection of content copied from other websites or created wholly using artificial intelligence tool?
Keep in mind, with the March 2024 update, Google clearly indicated in its new spam policy, its resolve to rein in on scaled content abuse, targeted at websites creating large content with little to zero value to end users.
With this in mind, you have to evaluate your existing content to really ascertain if its valuable to your users. Remember a valuable content is a piece of content that informs, entertains or helps users to solve a specific need.
Use this step to identify if your website content is creating this outcome for your users.
Remove Unhelpful Content
Now that you’ve successfully evaluated your content, it’s time to remove content that are not valuable or helpful to your users, if you really want to recover from the helpful content update.
To get this done properly, you don’t have to log in and start deleting your content. Take a step back, review and map out all content you think are adding less value to your users.
When you’re done and you’ve been able to ascertain their entire number, you can then map and delete some of these content one after the other then redirect the deleted content to other relevant pages on your websites.
Be careful. Redirection is usually a good practice in most instances but it can be meaningless in some. For example, while deleting a duplicate page on your website, it’s okay to redirect the traffic from the page you’re deleting to another page on the website.
In that case, you’ll not lose your traffic and link juice. However where you’re deleting a page that is impacted negatively like in this case, it is okay to skip the redirection process as that will not deliver any value since that particular page is already being impacted negatively.
Alongside deleting low value content, remove pages with zero, thin content or fewer words content from your website. This is very important.
Disavow Spammy Backlinks
Spammy links are those links from low value or irrelevant websites. Like those links from domain that have been marked as spammy by Google itself.
From websites we’ve worked with, I have personally noticed that links from spammy websites have led to some of the biggest impact on websites in 2024.
Also, based on my research, a number of websites owners that disavowed (removed) these spammy links from their websites were able to recover from the helpful content update, to a very good degree.
So, if you want to experience some recovery from HCU and start getting visibility, you want to consider taking a critical look at your backlink profile. Find out the ones from spammy or irrelevant websites and take steps to disavow them using your search console.
This will lead to some slight improvement for your website.
Improve your Website
Outside content quality, your website as a whole will have a role to play when it comes to your overall indexing and ranking.
To get started, you want to consider asking yourself the following questions; is my website fast, responsive and mobile friendly? You can run a quick website analysis to find answers, using SEO tools like Pingdom tools, Google Page Speed Insights etc.
Your analysis will give you some insights on your current website performance. With these insights, you can take immediate steps to improve your website.
For example, where the website is slow, take recommended steps to make it faster by fixing your technical search engine optimization as recommended based on your analysis.
If your website is currently not mobile friendly, take steps to make it mobile compliant and delivering web pages faster for your mobile users.
Create, Publish Honest & Helpful Content
One of the major goals of the helpful content update is to get creators to evolve better and more meaningful content for end users, especially in an era of Artificial Intelligence and Automated content generation.
Remember content marketing is all about creating a specific value to a specific audience in order to deliver on clear outcomes.
With the evolution of AI, most creators have used Artificial Intelligence tools to create and publish content at scale. And often times, these content do not add enough value to the users.
With the recent Google Update, these kind of content are now strictly Google content policies. So, to recover from helpful content update, you want to intentionally publish helpful, honest and valuable content for your audience.
Avoid relying on the use of AI tools alone to create your content. Focus on ensuring that each piece of content you create solves a specific problem for your audience satisfactorily.
Demonstrate expertise; show that you have a firsthand experience with what you’re creating content on. Also, showcase authoritativeness and trustworthiness through your content. Be very clear and honest with your posts.
Done well, this will improve on your reputation and overall ranking.
Target other Traffic Sources
While waiting for results from your efforts to start coming in, you can take further steps to recover from helpful content update by targeting other traffic sources.
For example, there are other traffic sources outside organic search engine traffic. This includes traffic from social media, third party website links, paid traffic, email traffic etc.
Depending on your niche, you want to explore these other traffic sources. Starting with the social media, dust up your content toolkit and had over to the social media to create and share engaging content.
Use this to build your fans, grow your page and eventually, you can start posting content with links from your website as part of your content. I know a number of websites that a large chunk of their traffic is coming from the social media and they are doing quite well with it.
In addition to that, consider posting and reposting your content on some web 2.0 websites as well while linking back to your original website link.
Furthermore, use guest posting to kill two birds with one stone by attracting quality links from other websites while also getting some traffic in return.
Where you have the budget, try paid traffic too. This could work for direct paid traffic from the search engine like Google for example or you can pay for direct traffic from the social media which is mostly cheaper.
The goal for this is to get you to deliver some visits to your websites regardless of the HCU penalty.
PS: Using paid traffic might be expensive for websites on a budget so you want to consider your pros and cons before setting up such. Also, pay attention to results you’re getting from that. This is very important.
Wait for the Next Update
So, the helpful content update is like a classifier where a domain name is classified as unhelpful. These classifiers get changed on the next updates especially where the webmaster has taken steps to effect changes.
Where you have taken all the steps listed above and you’re not able to recover from helpful content update after several months, then you have to wait for the next update. This step has helped some website owners that were directly affected by the update.
Also, Google itself has mentioned during the web creators summit 2024 that a new update is in the offing. And the expectation with this update is that specific algorithmic changes from the update will lead to improvement on websites that were affected. Especially those websites that have taken steps to address the issues that led to the impact.
Beyond that, even if it was not mentioned, it will only be fair to wait and see the possible outcomes of any major update on your website after taking these steps before you can decide on the next step forward.
Start a New Domain Altogether
Some website owners impacted by the recent update who were invited to attend the Google Creator Summit have mentioned that the best step forward to recover is to move on to something else.
This is exactly what I advised one of my clients, way back before the summit held. After outlining these steps, I mentioned that the other alternative was to get a new domain altogether.
As a matter of fact, taking all these steps will demand a lot of work, effort and patience. You will also exercise an even longer patience while you wait for the outcomes to settle in.
And based on posturing from the summit attendees and even Google’s own John Muller, there’s a chance that there might be significant changes after the next core update. That gives just a 50/50 chance at a total recovery.
If you’re not willing to go all the way for just a 50/50 chance to recover from the helpful content update, you can consider starting from scratch with a new domain and a brand new website.
I don’t like to break the bad news. But with the right search engine optimization strategy and very good content, starting afresh can deliver a much better outcome in the long run. But, the call is on you to decide.
Final Words
I believe by now you’ve not just learned that it’s possible to recover from the recent helpful content update, you have identified the proven steps you can take to actually activate your recovery process.
And even more importantly, you’ve identified the next steps you can take, should your effort not turn out as expected, whether you’re an expert or not.
I hope that you’ll use this guide to start a whole new journey to a better and improved traffic to your website. And you can always reach out to us where you feel stocked.
And finally, to get a better analysis of your website traffic, reach out to our SEO experts here. And we’ll get you started on your next steps.
Now, it’s over to you. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced with the helpful content update? Drop your comments below.
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