Based on what I see with sites heavily impacted by HCU and what Google explained in its April documentation update, the combination of unhelpful content and poor UX can be an extremely problematic combination for site owners.
Update: 10/2/23:
Included in delivery a section via Google’s latest blog post on web.dev about how to serve ads effectively without sacrificing performance, user experience, etc.
———-
On September 14, 2023 Google rolled out the helpful content update from September. This was the third helpful content update and the largest of the three HCUs to date. I’ve documented over 500 domains affected by the update so far, and my list continues to grow every day.
Here are some examples of the extreme declines based on the September HCU. These are medieval panda-like drops:
Once the dust settles I may write a post more about the update, but I wanted to cover a particular theory I had based on analysis of many websites affected by the update. Firstly, after looking through these sites, most simply don’t have great content… I see AI generated content, programmatic content used to create lots of unhelpful pages, sites that cover every possible variation on a topic, without truly insightful information to provide valuable information and more. I also analyzed websites that have seen significant declines in a number of categories, including lyrics, calculations, travel, translations, downloads, games, and many more.
Obviously the system targets unhelpful content, but that’s not the only thing I see. Some other sites I analyzed definitely caught my attention. I’m not saying they have the best content in the world, but they don’t seem to have the worst content either… There are sites, for example, that have been crushed in the areas of recipes, instructions and reviews that don’t fall into the same category Category of unhelpful content like what I explained before.
And a common thread across many affected websites, even those with content that might not be terrible, is a terrible user experience. In other words, the advertising situation is serious on many websites, users are bombarded with ads all over the site, auto-playing videos follow you as you scroll down the page, and then you may also face pop-ups.
This is exactly the kind of aggressive, disruptive, and sometimes even misleading advertising situation I’ve been talking about for years. And when I say years, I mean since the medieval Panda days in 2011. I’ve seen myself helping recover from Panda on many websites. And now here we are, with something that looks like Panda on steroids. I’ve always said, “Hell hath no fury like a user scorned,” and I have a feeling that might be the motto for the newest HCU.
First, here’s a slide from one of my Comprehensive Core Updates presentations where I cover aggressive advertising:
And then just one of many tweets I shared about aggressive advertising and core updates (this one links to a video from John Mueller that explains more about taking a step back and reviewing the site overall):
And I even talked about what I’ve seen so far on a podcast with Dre last Friday (at 55:10 in the video):
The HCU is developing into the HCU(X)?
With the original HCU in August 2022, the affected websites were the most egregious from a content quality standpoint. But Google’s Danny Sullivan said at the time that Google was taking the helpful content system seriously and would continue to improve it, and that the system would evolve over time.
And it has evolved… the helpful content update from September 2023 was (by far) the most powerful of the HCUs so far. Again, I documented hundreds of domains that were destroyed by the update. Additionally, many website owners have reached out to me asking for help, and I have heard from many industries about the extreme volatility HCU is causing across websites. It’s a beast.
So what has changed?
First, Google stated that the HCU has an improved classifier, and this is clearly obvious. The sheer number of affected websites is infinitely greater than previous HCUs. Secondly, and this is the crux of my post today, Google has updated its documentation in April 2023 about the site experienceand has expressly included this information in its documentation create helpful content.
Yes, that could have been the warning about the HCU’s goal in September. With this documentation update, Google shifted the focus away from the core functionality of the web and wanted website owners to focus on the user experience in total. From the questions, you can clearly see that Google covers a broader range of REAL user experience problems, as opposed to a core web vitality score that might be off by a few milliseconds.
For example, Google covers an excessive amount of ads that distract or interfere with the main content, intrusive interstitials, how easily visitors can navigate to or find the main content of the page, can users easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page, and more.
Again, I am NOT saying that UX alone will kill a website. Google uses machine learning with the HCU, which means that it sends a lot of signals to the machine learning system, which dictates the weight of these signals, which ultimately determines the ranking. But the addition of this information in the helpful content documentation and the fact that these terrible UX situations are affecting many affected websites makes me think that both are related.
Google has also provided one specific FAQ in this blog post from April about the helpful content system. As you can see below, content is the focus, but UX certainly plays a role:
So I believe the focus of HCU is to remove unhelpful content from the SERPs, but user experience does play a role. And combining low-quality content with terrible UX is the death knell for HCU. I explained in my SMX Advanced presentation a few months ago that the helpful content system was Google’s secret weapon in the fight against various types of low-quality content, but it doesn’t look like content is the only thing they look at algorithmically . In my opinion, UX crept in when they added this documentation change in April. I just don’t think it resonated with many site owners until this update came out.
Improving user experience – and I’m not referring to the key web vitals…
For website owners heavily impacted by the September 2023 helpful content update, the focus should clearly be on providing quality and insightful content that can help users. But I would make sure you don’t drive these users crazy while they try to consume your content. And if you find yourself in a situation where you think your content is fine but you’re still feeling pressured, then definitely take a close look at your UX, ad situation, popups and more. I wouldn’t bombard users with ads, I wouldn’t trigger pop-ups like crazy, I wouldn’t follow users around the site with auto-playing videos, and I would make sure your main content can be easily and quickly identified by users.
Too close to your own website? Conduct a user study!
If you feel like you’re getting too close to your own website, conduct a user study. I wrote a post about conducting user studies around major core updates a few years ago, and Google ended up linking to that post from their own article on major core updates. You can learn so much when objective third-party users go through your website and rate their experience based on specific algorithm updates. For more information on conducting a study, see my post.
Update: Google’s new blog post on web.dev about ads and the user experience.
On Friday (September 29th, 2023) Markus Bordih from Google will speak published a blog post on web.dev, which talks about how to load ads effectively without affecting performance, user experience, etc. I found this timing very interesting considering HCU was just launching and UX seemed to be part of the equation (as covered in my post here). ).
I highly recommend reading Markus’ article as it describes how to serve ads without impacting the user experience. The post contains some great quotes that I think many affected by September’s HCU should read in detail.
Take, for example, this quote about the need to balance revenue generation with a solid user experience (and not frustrating users):
“Imagine a website that heavily places ads throughout its content with the goal of generating high revenue. However, the overwhelming number of ads frustrates users, resulting in poor user experience and high bounce rates. Despite the potential for significant advertising revenue, the closure of the site will significantly impact the success of the site.”
Or this quote about ads running above the fold (which reminds me Page Layout Algorithm. which came onto the market years ago – also known as the “above the fold” algorithm):
“While above the fold ad placements are valuable, it’s important not to overload this prime space with too many ads. Excessive ads clutter the page, reduce content readability, and degrade user experience. Strive for a balance between monetization and maintaining a clean, user-friendly layout.”
And then this quote about below-the-fold ads and how they shouldn’t affect the quality or readability of the content:
“Placing ads below the fold should not impact the quality or readability of the content. Maintain a balance between ads and content to avoid overwhelming users and ensure a positive user experience.”
This is also a very interesting time for Google to publish this post on web.dev. If you are affected by the helpful September 2023 content update, I highly recommend you read it (and then share it with everyone on your team).
Summary: Dealing with a major HCU hit in September 2023.
Again, I may share more about this update in a future post, but I wanted to provide this information about UX after going through many sites affected by September’s HCU, or should I say HCU(X)? Also, I would like to remind you that the helpful content update usually does not allow you to recover quickly. In order for the HCU classifier to be abandoned, Google must see significant changes in the long term (which could take months). So if you’ve noticed a strong impact, you need to work hard to improve both your content and user experience. Good luck.
GG