Here's How Sites RECOVERED From Google's September and March HCU (August 2024 Core Update)

Here is a brief summary of the transcript: - The transcript discusses recoveries of websites impacted by Google's August 2024 core update. Several sites are analyzed that have seen traffic increases after making changes like removing low-quality pages, overhauling content, and improving user experience. - The speaker concludes that SEO is not fully "back" to how it was before, as sites making recoveries have put significant work into improving content quality and user experience. Complete recoveries will take time. - Monetization and content quality are still key factors in Google's algorithm. Backlinks alone are unlikely to lead to big recoveries for impacted sites. - AI content is still considered risky. The speaker hasn't seen true long-term recoveries for low-quality AI content sites that were hit by updates. More editing and oversight is recommended when using AI content. - Overall the speaker feels positive that sites can recover if they make genuine efforts to improve content quality, remove low-value pages, and enhance user experience. A complete reversal overnight is unrealistic but recoveries are possible through ongoing algorithm-aligned efforts.

So we are now two weeks after the August 2024 core update has started rolling out and we are starting to see some significant recoveries across many websites. But the question is, is SEO actually back or is this just a bunch of sites recovering that complaint? A bunch on Twitter. So in this video, I'm going to be analyzing a bunch of sites that were hit and who are making recoveries right now, as well as some of the changes they've been making to get that recovery. And at the end of the video, I'll be going over my overall conclusions and what you should be doing to protect your rankings or to try to recover your websites that have lost rankings because of helpful content updates. All right, let's get into it. So I'm Chris Jesus and you might know me for my link building agency over at Solingsalot Co. Or maybe you've seen me on our other YouTube channel or Facebook group, or maybe you've seen me around at some SEO conferences or on some other podcast, but you can go to my website for more information on me. So real quick over on the Google search status dashboard you can see that the August 2024 core update is still rolling out, started on August 15 over here and you can see the error that was causing a bunch of bugs or whatever is actually finished and fixed. And also you can see on Semrush sensor that we are still in the red, meaning that things are moving around a lot still. So just remember this update was supposed to take a month to roll out. How long is going to actually going to take? We don't really know. The last one ended up taking I think a few months. So that was kind of crazy. So now let's go ahead and get into the analysis and look at some websites that are recovering. First up we have driveinreview.com dot. It looks like they've gone from about twelve traffic up to about 14k. Before the September HCU they were at about 40k traffic. So I guess that's about a 30 or 35% recovery. Not too shabby. Some notes I have, it seems that the website is legit and they have real eat. What I mean by that is if you come over to the website, you can see that they've got all these unique images. They are actually reviewing the things that they are talking about here. Content is not a generated. One thing to note is I am not seeing any kind of monetization on this website right now. I'm not really seeing ads or anything. I'm not seeing any kind of affiliate offers. The one thing that I am seeing is that they are driving traffic to their email list down here at the bottom of every article. I think it's important to note that I'm not seeing any kind of affiliate links or ads on the site right now because as we know, it looked like a bunch of the sites that were hit by the helpful content update were really just having this kind of monetization methods. Right? Next up, it looks like they deleted a bunch of pages. We come over to organic keywords to compare with one year ago. You can see that a lot of the pages have been removed. You click and they just goes to 404s on their website. So let's look at the type of content they removed real quick. Here's a net worth article problems with some car model more problems. Life expectancy. Another net worth article. Another net worth article problems. See how it kind of looks like a mix of stuff that maybe they shouldn't be trying to rank for, as well as some stuff that I would think they would be just fine ranking for. But maybe they are really trying to stick to more of the reviews and the kind of pros of cons of each car and see that their traffic is coming back to a bunch of pages in general, not just the one page. And if we compare with the previous year, you can see on the right hand side that they are making moderate to major content changes on pretty much all of the content on their website. So considering they did remove a bunch of pages on their website, which you can see by this yellow line here, it does look like, you know, this recovery could actually be pretty good because, you know, they've removed a lot of pages. So obviously it can't get back to the original traffic amount because they've just removed so many pages. Right, and they've still recovered about 30% of the traffic or so. So I think this one's actually doing pretty well. Next up we have bakeandbaking.com dot and see that this one's traffic has actually gone to about 24k, which was higher than it's ever been before, which is actually kind of crazy. The problem with this one, however, is if you go over to top pages, you can see pretty much all of their traffic is coming from one page. They do have some other pages in here and they are getting traffic gains to a lot of pages on their website. But really, like all of this traffic is going to one page. So I don't really like this example too much, even though people have been showing this graph a lot. I think if you kind of look in things a little bit more. This recovery doesn't really make me as excited as some of the other ones I've seen. You can see over on the right hand side, they are doing overhauls on a lot of their pages and pretty much changing every page that's on their website. Right. A couple more things to note about this one. They still have ads on their website, so they are still monetized with ad revenue, which is cool to see. And the site looks very original and legit as far as the information and eat goes. Just like the last one. You know, these are unique images. The content looks original, not AI spam. Looks like that's actually human written. Here's an ad on the website. There's more ads, actually a good amount of ads all over this website. Right. Next up we have the infamous housefresh.com. the last time I looked at this website, I think that about six k traffic recovered. And if you haven't seen my previous video on them, I do a deep dive on their content and what they're changing in this video right here. So you go ahead and check that out. While you're at it. Go ahead and give my channel a subscribe if you're enjoying the content. And give this video a like too. So of course house fresh is still on the rise. Looks like they're at about 16k traffic right now. Just like I predicted. It looked like Ahrefs wasn't showing a bunch of stuff that they were going to gain for, but it looks like they're kind of slowing down as far, far as their gains go right now. We'll see how this continues over the next couple of weeks. Again, you can watch my other video for a lot more information on this one, but it looks like they removed a lot of their pages on their website. They did a complete overhaul of a lot of their content and their website is still monetized with affiliate links, which is good to see. Next up, we have that fit friend, which was another one that a lot of people were talking about. Looks like they've gone from about 1.5k traffic up to about 32k. Their peak was about 160k. So they've still got quite a while to go. However, that was kind of a rapid increase there. I would say their baseline was probably more around one hundred k, one hundred ten k or so. So I'd call this about a 30% recovery, really, which is, yeah, another good one to see. I was looking at their website and if you scroll down, I found this little blurb right here that says I updated this article in January 24 and added more context to my updated performance. Thoughts about this shoe? I also reworked the UX of this review to make it easier to navigate UX meaning user experience, which is definitely something I've been talking about in my other videos as well. So definitely go ahead and check those out. Really seems like user experience is getting more important in Google's measuring clicks, how users interact on your website, stuff like that. Make sure they're not pogo sticking and going clicking another result. So I've talked about this website in previous videos as well and this was one of the websites I was like this really had no business in getting hit. It just seemed like a really good site. Unique images, unique content. He was obviously testing the products, so it's really good to see this one recovering and still making money with affiliate revenue. If we come over and look at their top pages from one year ago, you can see that it says overhaul on a lot of the pages over here, which means they're making very significant content changes. And out of all the sites that I've looked at, I feel like this one actually had the most significant content changes. This really says overhaul on pretty much every article they have here. One cool thing to note about this one is it doesn't look like they really prunes too much content. They didn't remove much content, they just kind of overhauled everything. Going back to their overview here and clicking organic pages, you can see it looks like they really didn't remove anything aside from affiliate. They are monetized with ads as well. Except the ads aren't very intrusive like some of the other websites we've seen. Next up we have travel lemming. This one really looks just like a blip on the radar. They went from about 17k traffic to about 44k. They were almost up to about a million. So yeah, pretty small recovery on this one. Quick notes, it looks like they removed a lot of content. Like really a significant amount of content. Look at all that content removed right there. They are doing content reworks as well, as you can see over here. And the website still has ads as well as affiliate for this one. I will say it looks like they might have started working on it a bit later than some of the other websites. I'm not really sure. So anyways, I'll be keeping an eye on this one as well and we'll see if what they are doing will eventually pay off a little bit more than just this. Next up we have guitar, chalk.com looks like they went from about 15k traffic to 24k. So not the biggest recovery, but yeah, they didn't have huge traffic to begin with. Only about 45k where they were starting up before the HCU. Looks like they did not remove any pages at all. It looks like the referring domain count has been going up pretty significantly as well. I wonder if that's just from press that they've been getting from SEOs talking about their website. So real quick, they didn't remove content, they still have affiliate links. And the content also looks real with high amounts of eat. Meaning. Yeah, not AI spam. And lastly, we have an example from someone in our Facebook groups. Not a famous site at all. Hasn't done any complaining on Twitter, just a regular guy, probably like you. He gave us a nice GSC screenshot here and he's saying that traffic has pretty much got to back to where it was before the HEU and is actually higher than it was before the September HCU, which was back here. So this one definitely took a little hit during the HCU. Then they kind of had some gains, then they went down again and they had a pretty big rise. And then they got slapped by the march corps which had HCU rolled into it. And a lot of people saw as just an extension of the helpful content update. So what he did was he got rid of ads. He had a zoic on his website. He also disavowed some k HTML spam backlinks. I wrote this article on sir links, a lot about these spam backlinks if you want to read more about that. Normally we ignore this kind of stuff, but it seemed like for some reason Google was not ignoring these and a lot of people were seeing results from disavowing them. So it might be something to consider if you got them kind of flooding your backlink profile. He did no content pruning at all. Real content, no AI and high levels of eat. And lastly, Mister Matt Diggity released a new video I think this morning actually, and there were just a couple things I wanted to cover from that real quick. He mentioned that as far as recovering websites, this is what he's doing. First of all, he's removing pages that have no clicks in Google search console over the past three or six months or whatever. He's marking red pages with less than 30 clicks over the past time period, pages that had less than 100 clicks. And the topic also doesn't align with the kind of core topic of the website. So for example, if you're writing about car reviews and you have a net worth article might not really make sense to have this kind of content on your website. You mentioned that you should not remove important pages even if they fail these checks. Of course, you know, some category pages or product pages or maybe just some kind of info pages on your website, talking about your policies and stuff like that. Obviously you don't want to remove stuff like this if it's core to your website. Talking about blog articles here, any pages that were removed, he is doing 301 redirects to relevant pages. So if the article was about the Honda CRV and you can just redirect it to some other article that's closely related to it or as close as possible, and if you can't find a good target, you can just 301 redirect to your homepage. Lastly, if you had some content that failed these checks, you could think about improving that content if you do not want to delete it. So what do I think about all this stuff? Is SEO actually back? Remember, there are still two weeks left in this update. You'll be able to see on this page when it is completely finished rolling out. So a lot still is happening right now. And overall, I would say that I'm still pretty excited about this. I still have very good feelings about this. However, I don't think we can really expect SEO to just return to how it was before the September HCU, meaning, you know, low energy affiliate and ads based website with AI content spam. I don't think I would be interested in doing any kind of project like this anytime soon at all. No. All of these websites that we reviewed today that are making recoveries, they're making significant changes to the website. They have significant levels of eat, they have quality content, they're actually reviewing the stuff that they're talking about or have real experience with it. Unique images. And let's be real, a lot of people that were making money with SEO affiliate ads based kind of content websites were not doing this type of content before. Also, I'd like to say that we can't expect these sites to have just complete recoveries yet. You know, you have a lot of people saying, well, hey, it's only gained ten or 20 or 30% of its traffic back. This is not good. We need more than that. However, I think that's kind of unrealistic because, you know, a lot of these websites, it really took a long time for them to lose all of their traffic. Now here it went from July down to may down here for travel lemming to lose all of their websites. We can't expect them to just get gains in two weeks. I feel like that's totally unfair. Google's not just going to completely revert things to back how they were before. They're actually thinking they're on the right path here with the changes they're trying to make to their algorithm. And as we know, SEO takes time. Google needs to be at least somewhat stable, even though obviously they haven't been very stable lately with these updates. But they can't just revert everything back super quickly. Right? Next up, there are plenty of non complainer sites recovering. I see a lot of people saying, you know, it's only these websites that everyone knows about that are recovering, and that's just simply not the case. I've seen a bunch of websites recovering a lot actually that have nothing to do with complaining on Twitter, talking with Google or anything like that. There's actually a lot more people that were complaining, sites like Retrododo and stuff like that that I did not cover in this video that are recovering as well. I just want to emphasize here that I think this is completely bogus. And I think a lot of people that are saying this are just still a little butthurt that they lost a bunch of rankings in traffic and maybe they just don't trust Google. And hey, I don't trust Google either. I get it. I'm a link builder. We can't just take Google's word for what they're saying. But this is definitely a lot bigger than just a few sites recovering. And actually, like I showed you before, the biggest recovery that we saw was just a regular guy from our Facebook group. Right, next up, I still think monetization and content quality is pretty much everything with these updates. What content quality actually is, is kind of hard to talk about, but we're talking about unique firsthand experience, unique images, something original, and that's just copy and pasted AI or rehashing of the same articles that everyone else already has. So, like in Diggity's video here, can we get results just from pruning a bunch of unhelpful content? I think that can probably help for sure, but I think if all of the content left on your website is still kind of low quality, then it might not really do too much. So you might have to do some work as well as removing content, which of course he mentioned here, improving content you don't want to delete. Next up, let's talk about backlinks. Of course, being the owner of a link building agency, I wish I could tell you that buying more backlinks from us will just solve all of your problems. However, I do not think that is the case. I think sites that have extreme levels of authority, I'm saying like Doctor 80 or 90 plus are definitely treated a little bit differently, but they can be affected by these updates as well. But for most people, if you got hit, I don't think building backlinks to your website is really going to get you the gains that you're looking for. Just like on all of these websites that we reviewed earlier, they are doing major content overhauls. A lot of them are removing content that shouldn't be on their website. Some of them have even removed monetization methods like ads and really just doing some major on site changes. Right. And lastly, I want to cover AI content. I still think AI content is still extremely sketchy. Don't get me wrong, I use AI all the time when I'm creating my content. However, it's just as a starting point and as in thing to get additional ideas. But I always use my AI content editing checklist here to do a bunch of super important stuff like adding eat information, gain, brand check, fact check, all this kind of stuff. Anyways, I still see a lot of people promoting this AI content spam as a way to make money online. I feel like it's pretty irresponsible at this point in time. I personally have not found any recoveries of these types of websites. So, meaning that if the website actually started getting a bunch of traffic and then they lost their traffic, did they recover? No, I haven't seen any recoveries on AI content spam websites that have done this. What these people are doing is they tend to show these examples where the website is gaining traffic over, you know, three, four months, something like that, and saying, oh look, AI content still works very well. However, I don't think that's long enough at all. I think what happens is Google starts giving you traffic, giving you traffic, giving you traffic. Then once the website actually has pretty decent traffic, I'm talking like more than 1000, probably more than like 5000, anything that would actually really matter and that you could actually make some money off of. And at that point when you're actually getting users on your website, Google then reevaluates you at a much higher standard and decides if you're going to keep that traffic or not. And usually with the AI content spam websites, they decide that you are not worthy of keeping that traffic and then they start knocking you down. So can AI content spam work in the short term? Absolutely it can. But then as soon as you start getting traffic, it just gets taken right away from you. I think a lot of these people are just still promoting this kind of thing for views and at this point here, you know, why are they not investing in link building for these websites? And it's because they know they're going to get hit, right? They are not going to start wasting money building expensive backlinks to these AI content spam websites because they're expecting them to get hit. However, I could be completely wrong about this. If you guys that are watching have any examples of AI content websites that have survived multiple core updates or have been hit by a core update, the September HCU, anything like that, and made significant recoveries and are still using very low energy, kind of not edited too much AI content, no unique images, no unique firsthand experience. You know what I'm talking about. If you can find this kind of stuff, go ahead and send it to me. I would love to take a look and I'd be happy to change my position on this if I'm completely wrong. But just remember, like I said before, I love using AI. I use it in a lot of my content creation processes. You just need to do a lot more than that if you want to protect your rankings in the long term. If you're doing short term kind of turn and burn stuff, then be my guest, right? So yeah, overall, I am actually feeling positive about this update. It's good to see that websites don't have a permanent penalty and if they try to do the right things and improve their content that there's hope for a recovery. Right? Is it 100% recovery? Nope, but that's just fine. We can expect things to just pop back to how they were overnight and I don't think we can ever expect things to go back to how they were before the September helpful content update. But what do you guys think? Let me know down in the comments if you are seeing site recoveries on your end. Hopefully you are. Go ahead and give the video a like and give my channel a sub if you're enjoying the content. And I will see you next time. Bye.