Google’s Danny Sullivan and John Mueller both made comments on social media that give me hope that sites affected by September’s Helpful Content update still have a chance at some recovery with Google’s next core update have.
Travel blogger Katie Café Travel has been working hard on improving their website and asked whether she should also work on building a readership.
According to Ahrefs estimates, their website appears to have been severely impacted by the HCU in September 2023. How frustrating to constantly work on improvements and continue to suffer losses.
Danny shared some Excellent advice in his tweet. I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’ll be posting a lot more in the coming weeks to help us understand how machine learning systems determine rankings, and so much has changed in the Google ranking systems we’ve studied for so many years. Knowing these systems helps give Danny’s advice to focus on your readers more credibility.
First, let’s focus on these words from Danny:
“Maybe the next core update will help”
Danny said: “As for the inevitable, ‘But I’ve done all these things, when will I recover!’ Questions, I would go back to what we said before. Maybe the next core update will helpas covered Here:
With the March core updatewas the helpful content system that impacted so many websites in September integrated into Google’s core systems.
We were hoping for a recovery, but I haven’t seen any reports yet!
It looks like the systems need a little more time to learn more about your hard work and the new helpful content you’ve created.
This means the affected websites may require another core update to begin recovery.
Danny pointed us to a tweet from John Mueller from last month that said something similar:
This makes me really excited for the next core update from Google. We don’t know when that will happen. It could be any day now or it could be months. I know so many of you have worked hard. Google told us that the March core update represents an evolution in how it identifies the usefulness of content.
I think we’ll see some interesting pages ranking as Google’s machine learning systems get better at identifying content that people are likely to find helpful.
Here’s some more reading you might find interesting:
What it will (probably) take to recover after a helpful content update in September 2023
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I have a lot of resources in front of me. My book “SEO in the Gemini Era: The Story of How AI Changed Google Search” is coming out soon. In addition, there will be free and paid products, including workbooks and a course that will help us learn more about the machine learning systems responsible for today’s ranking systems.
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I will publish my next one soon Blog post To Learning from the API files which contain Attributes used in search. The next one is not to be missed as I will share with you why I believe we are examining the attributes of an old search engine that is very different from the machine learning driven system responsible for today’s rankings!
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