SEO report: Google helpful content update

Google’s September Helpful Content update started rolling out on 14 Sep 2023 and within days, many content creators have reported severe drops in organic traffic from search engines.

The Helpful content update, also known as HCU has been considered the most impactful update for SEO to date since 2012.

Barry Schwartz said that the impact of HCU was similar in magnitude to Penguin (2012) which targeted websites using manipulative link building. Websites that were hit by Penguin had experienced drastic -50% traffic drops or more.

The volume of websites impacted and the extent of impact are what make this helpful content update such a critical one in the last decade.

Here is discussion thread on X with numerous website owners sharing their analytics data about HCU’s impact.

When did this happen?

Google’s Helpful content update started on 14 Sep 2023 and ended on 28 Sep 2023. This new update happened over 14 days.

The timeline is important because it tells us the period of time when the impact would take effect. At the least when the most significant impact from the HCU would be felt.

If your website had a sudden increase or decrease in organic traffic and the date when it happened coincided with the HCU, you can make a good guess that it could be due to the update.

We cannot know for sure if a site’s traffic change is due to a Google update or just normal ranking shifts because of competition.

Because there is no official indictor or score from Google that tells us whether an update has been applied on our website.

What this means

When Google started the HCU on 14 Sep, it means the search results are starting to change based on the helpful content signals. It means your website rankings may start to change (improve or decline) based on this update.

When Google completed the update on 28 Sep 2023, it means that the update has been rolled out to all of Google’s search results.

This means that the update is now finished and how Google now ranks websites and display on search results is final.  Where your site rankings stand now are likely permanent for a while until the system updates again. According to this, the helpful signal runs continuously so if your site quality has improved, the unhelpful classification would no longer apply and that help rankings.

This update is now complete.

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 28, 2023

This case study

In this case study, I hope to better understand what helpful content actually means by studying Google’s documentation and websites impacted.

Through my work as a SEO coach and course instructor to 4,000 students, with their permission I will be using the data available from my community to study and share the impact of the HCU.

To contribute to the case study, you are welcome to submit your website for review. As the helpful content system continues to affect the search results, this case study should be updated over time as well.

If you are reading this and experiencing effects from the HCU, I hope this case study helps shed some light on what is going on.

My main focus is distilling Google’s documentation and the real impact on website rankings so far. You’ll also find general recommendations and best practices to work towards recovery.

Good references from SEO experts and Google’s documentation

Now, let’s begin with some good analyses done by SEO experts already written:

• Notes from Marie Haynes about the Helpful content system here, here, and here
• Casey Markee wrote a very concise article about How to survive and thrive in a helpful content world. I re-read this a few times.
• Eric Lancheres from On page AI wrote an amazing study breaking down the Helpful content system with practical examples. This was very insightful.

Next Google’s own documentation which is the source of all SEO recommendations on the HCU. This is also where you can differentiate fact from fiction.

• SEO Fundamentals: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. This is the most comprehensive writeup from Google about content quality questions, and how helpfulness is related to EEAT and Search raters guidelines. Bookmark this.
• Ranking updates: Google Search’s helpful content system and your website. This is a short summary of how the HCU is an automated system and applies site-wide. Google tells us they are using a helpfulness classifier.
• April 2023: The role of page experience in creating helpful content. This is when Google told us experience factors are part of content helpfulness.

Google’s September 2023 helpful content update impact

While drastic traffic drops from HCU have been widely reported, there are also reports of websites experiencing positive effects and no change at all. Let’s have a look at some of these websites and their data.

Mediavine

Since the helpful content update primarily impacted blogging sites, I think the report from Mediavine is relevant to understand impact.

Mediavine reported that out of the 10,302 sites they represent, 5.8% were negatively impacted. And 11% had seen positive impact since the update. This is traffic impact not revenue.

• This means for the websites that were negatively impacted, there were twice as many websites positively impacted.
• This also means majority of websites represented by Mediavine, 83% of sites were NOT impacted at all and stayed the same. 

I think this is very comforting news. For blogs that rely on ad revenue, 83% from Mediavine have not seen significant changes to their Google traffic according to the report.

Which means majority of blogging sites that monetize on Mediavine, one of the top ad networks, they were able to safeguarded their rankings and traffic since HCU rolled out.

Positive impact

There are also websites that have been positively impacted since Google’s Helpful Content Update rolled out on 14 September 2023.

For the above website, another thing that we noticed was that the site started to rank in more SERP features. That means featured snippets, people also ask, sitelinks, etc.

And because the site ranked in more SERP features, its organic traffic has increased nearly 3 fold in a few weeks since HCU.

You may be wondering, coincidence? Would this have happened anyway without update?

Don’t know. But for the past 6 months this website’s traffic and rankings did not make any movements until now… after the helpful content update rolled out.

Data from our 1:1 SEO Coaching Clients

After the September 2023 helpful content update rolled out, we started keeping an eye on our 1-on-1 clients sites and some of our alumni client sites for the next two weeks.

Majority of our 1:1 clients are local and service based businesses. We’ve reviewed a few blogging sites who monetize with adsense and there hasn’t been much turbulence to be honest.

The general trend we are seeing for our clients have been no noticeable changes at all from organic search traffic since the update and some had experienced positive effects.

another client site with increased traffic:

I’ve come to believe that websites who could demonstrate authenticity and original first-hand experience in their content were more able to meet high-quality content standards. Content creators who establish themselves through guest contributions and podcasts could build a positive reputation which is another important factor for high quality content.

Throughout this study, we learn why authenticity and expertise have been crucial to safeguard rankings against Google’s helpful content update.

First, how do you know if you have been impacted by HCU?

How to know if you have been negatively impacted by the Helpful content update

There is no way to know for sure if your website’s organic traffic drop is because of the HCU or the normal state of search where competitors are outranking your site.

But if your website’s organic traffic decline coincides with the time period when the HCU update was rolled out, you can make a good guess that your site may have very likely been hit with Google’s helpful content update.

So this is the first sign.

The second sign is the extent of ranking and traffic impact.

A normal search competition effect would see a few or a handful of pages drop in rankings because of competitors outranking you.

But if your website has been hit by the update it means Google has classified the entire website as unhelpful. Because Google’s helpful content update is a site-wide signal.

This leads to ANY content on your website to be suppressed. So you may notice nearly all web pages on the site losing rankings and traffic.

My process to evaluate HCU impact

The process to evaluate the impact of HCU on a website is quite straight forward. We want to find a handful of blog posts with the most difference in organic traffic and what are the main keywords that have led to the article’s traffic decline.

The difficult part is working through Google’s helpful content documentation and figuring out how to improve our content.

There are 3 tools we can use to evaluate the HCU impact.

• Google Search Console
• Semrush
• Ahrefs

Google search console is our main tool. You can do plenty of analysis with it alone.

It is a free tool by Google and the only tool that can give you accurate data about the number of organic clicks and impressions to your website. Here is an article on how to set up Google search console if you haven’t done so yet.

Semrush and Ahrefs are optional.

Timeframe

Set a before and after HCU timeframe.

• For the before HCU date range: 1 – 30 July (Any 30 day period before September is fine)
• For the after HCU date range: 18 Sep – 18 Oct. (This is the period when the HCU first started to take effect)

Method 1: Using Google search console

Step 1: Pick a blog post that had the highest difference in organic traffic before and after HCU.

I suggest using Google search console for this first step to get accurate organic traffic data about your website pages.

Then, do a before and after HCU comparison. Click on Date: compare and set a custom before and after date range.

Go to the pages table.

Sort the pages by highest clicks difference. These are pages worst hit with the highest loss of organic traffic.

Step 2: Check keyword queries position change. Focus on keyword queries with the highest difference in clicks. 

We want to know what are the keywords for that blog post that have lost rankings that resulted in the highest difference in clicks. These were the top traffic generating queries for the article.

If we want to recover this article’s traffic decline, we would start with those traffic generating queries.

Method 2: Using Semrush

The benefit of SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs is that it provides more data to make analysis. For example, we can see the search volume and keyword difficulty metrics alongside keywords too.

Step 1: Same as the first step from Method 1. 

Pick the blog post with the most organic clicks difference after HCU.

Step 2: Take that URL and paste it in Semrush to find keyword ranking change.

Go to Organic Research > Check the Position Changes > Declined

Go to the keyword table below. Sort by highest traffic change.

These are the keywords for the blog post that have led to the most organic traffic decline. Notice how some keywords have dropped by just -5 positions and the traffic impact is -2K?

That is the kind of keyword we want to spend our time studying later to improve our ranking position.

There are other keywords like the one that dropped by -75 positions but the traffic impact is just -181. That is a less important keyword to focus our time on.

(Optional) Assess the ranking distribution of that blog post URL over the last 6 months. 

This is an additional step to see how the number of ranking keywords have changed over time.

Ranking distribution is the total number of keywords ranking on Google and where they are ranking.

October 2023 is the month after HCU. Make notes of anything that is different compared to previous months.

For this blog post, I can see that the top 3 rankings have disappeared in Oct.

The number of keywords in positions 21-50 and 51-100 have decreased a lot.

Method 3: Using Ahrefs

Step 1: Same as the first step from Method 1. 

Pick the blog post with the most organic clicks difference after HCU.

Step 2: Take that URL and paste it in Ahrefs to find keyword ranking change.

Go to the Organic Keywords report > Position: Declined.

Go to the keyword table below. Pick a date before HCU to compare the difference.

See the keyword ranking change and the difference in organic traffic. Sort by highest traffic change.

These are the top traffic generating keywords and their position changes.

Understanding Google’s helpful content system

In this section I will try to distill Google’s documentation, how the helpful content system works. My goal here is to understand what the HCU is doing and how that translates to rankings and traffic impact.

You are welcome to share your feedback in the comments below! Here Google actually tells us how the HCU impact is going to be felt on a website.

In the first three paragraphs Google reveals a very important consequence.

Any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.

1. If the website has been classified as unhelpful, rankings of ANY content on that website can drop. Which means content that is truly helpful on that site could drop in rankings too because the website overall has been classified as unhelpful.

It says that ANY CONTENT could less likely perform well in search. If your website has been hit by the HCU, even helpful content on your site that passes Google’s quality questions and EEAT guidelines could lose rankings too.

That is why the organic traffic impact of HCU is so severe. 

Because not just unhelpful content but even helpful ones would be suppressed.

“less likely to perform well in Search” means that content will be suppressed on the search results. Google does not want to show ANY content from an unhelpful website highly anymore so people won’t land on it first during their search.

2. The threshold for a website to be classified as unhelpful and suppressed site-wide would need to be relatively high. 

This means that some people-first content on sites classified as having unhelpful content could still rank well, if there are other signals identifying that people-first content as helpful and relevant to a query. The signal is also weighted; sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect.

Source

This is my interpretation of Google’s statement. A website classified as HAVING unhelpful content is not the same as a website with LOTS of unhelpful content.

If a website has unhelpful content (moderate amount; not relatively high) and it has some people-first content, that people-first content could still rank well.

The people-first content would need to be on a site that is moderately unhelpful and not highly unhelpful. Otherwise, that people-first content wouldn’t perform well in search right?

As Google said: “Any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search“.

So there is a threshold to classify a website as having relatively high amounts of content. Which brings me to my next point.

3. Even if you have people-first content, it would very likely be suppressed because the entire website has been hit by the unhelpful classification. The way to improve would be to get your website ‘re-classified’ by Google’s HCU.

Sites identified by this system may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content hasn’t returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.

Source

This part sort of confuses me. If the HCU classifier runs continuously and monitors websites all the time, how can the signal be applied over a period of months?

Let’s say the HCU classifier monitors an existing website it had previously classified as unhelpful, and the next week the site has dramatically improved and finally becomes HELPFUL – wouldn’t the site be re-classified as helpful since Google’s signal would be updated with it running continuously?

I think if we take this statement optimistically, we can look towards recovery sooner than a period of months. 

4. Websites negatively impacted by HCU can see their rankings completely lost from search results. It could also see rankings demoted by a few positions or pages from search. This causes organic traffic loss because traffic generating keywords have dropped top ranking positions. I’ll show some examples later.

It is not a manual action nor a spam action. Instead, it’s just one of many signals Google evaluates to rank content.

Source

New advice and improved classifiers about the helpful content system

Over the past year, Google has been making changes to advice about the helpful content system and the classifiers to evaluate content helpfulness.

Google removes advice about content written by people

While Google still emphasizes the importance of creating original content that benefits users, they’ve removed the phrase “written by people” from their guidance.

This is good news for content creators using ai-written content. It is more important that content is helpful for users rather than it must be “written by people.” This does suggests a greater acceptance of AI-generated content as long as it is useful to people.

Third party on your website affects the quality of your site

This is a new addition to the helpful content guidelines about third party content. The concern here is when a third-party website tries to gain quick visibility by publishing its content on a larger website, such as a news publication.

In some cases, the larger website might allocate a dedicated section or sub-domain to the third-party. However, if the quality of this third-party content is poor and unrelated to the primary purpose of the main website, it can negatively impact the overall quality of the main website. This article by SEJ explains it.

Blog post case studies

I’m reviewing blog posts from sites that have been submitted for the case study and other sites I’ve come across, in hopes of understanding the helpful content update better. Here are my thoughts so far.

1) Traffic generating keywords have dropped top ranking positions

In one of the websites submitted for review with suspected HCU hit, I saw that their content pages had experienced significant traffic decline but after looking at the keyword queries, I think the cause may be quite subtle.

The HCU impact have been due to keyword ranking drops moving out of the top 3 positions to #6-10. This seems to be the main cause of one of their article’s traffic decline.

Takeaway: If you noticed your website may have been negatively impacted after this core update, check if the cause is due to a few ranking position drops. If yes, you should be able to recover soon by moving up higher and reclaiming your top ranking positions.

2) Keyword rankings have completely vanished

There are some websites with a stronger HCU impact and their keyword rankings have completely vanished from search results.

These cases are more severe and honestly, may likely never recover from it. At least, the chances are slim. Maybe you’d have better luck publishing a completely new article than to rework the existing one that has clearly been classified as unhelpful to this extent.

This shows the ranking page has been removed from search results for the keywords it previously ranked for. This is a fitness blog and their content coverage falls within the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topic.

Some parts of the article’s content are referenced below. Let’s move to content quality factors now.

Content quality standards for YMYL topics

When reviewing their content, I did notice some alarming health claims.

1. High factual accuracy for YMYL topics

From Google’s SQR guidelines, YMYL advice requires high factual accuracy scrutiny. Specifically information about YMYL topics need:

• accuracy and consistency with well-established expert consensus. For example, if medical experts do not endorse the claim that taking walks can effectively reverse insulin resistance and diabetes, then making such a claim contradicts the consensus among experts in the field.
• factually accurate and trustworthy. Could mild inaccuracy result in significant harm, or prevent someone from seeking life-saving treatment?
• if YMYL advice is provided on the website, the creator of the website needs to have expertise on that YMYL subject For example, if you are not a medical expert, you should not make any claims about what can help reverse diabetes. Here is another example of a low quality page Google referenced where the author does not have medical expertise.

2. Life experience for YMYL topics

I think this part of the SQR guidelines is very important for website owners in YMYL topics to set boundaries on what kind of information is safe to share, and what is probably out of bounds.

The SQR guidelines considers content that shares a person’s real experiences and struggles of a YMYL topic to be first-hand expertise. This qualifies as high-quality content because it documents the real experience someone has gone through.

Such content is considered to have real value. Similar to how forums contain detailed descriptions of people’s experiences, which Google’s helpful content update now seems to prefer.

I think this tells us that you can become a subject matter expert if you have significant first-hand expertise on your main topic.

3. Positive reputation of a website for YMYL topics

For YMYL topics, websites need recommendations from expert sources in their field. 

The SQR guidelines have cited sources from CDC, Mayo Clinic, and hospital websites as reputable sources for the healthcare topic.

It would make sense that getting recommendations from such websites would boost the reputation of a website providing health related information.

Here are the Highest Page Quality examples referenced (Health):

• Example 1: Mayo Clinic
• Example 2: NIH
• Example 3: CDC

Quality content standards for non-YMYL topics

The level of factual accuracy standards are lower for non-YMYL topics. Nonetheless, there is a standard that Google looks for in quality non-YMYL content. Source

There’s a reason why content and links have always been important for search rankings.

2. High originality content

In my website reviews for this case study, I came across this DIY beauty blog that has been relatively untouched from the HCU. This blog truly stood out in its originality that we don’t usually see in DIY blogs.

Here is one of her blog posts about how to make your own shampoo bar.

I think what makes this blog stand out from what we often see with DIY blogs is that the author, Marie Rayma does provide a high level of originality by developing her own formulations. She creates original formulations step by step with photos to show the exact process.

This type of content is simply not something that anyone can replicate. I think it does demonstrate a high level of knowledge superiority in her niche.

Higher content expertise has helped her content outrank authoritative sites like Wellness Mama and Wikihow who have considerably higher authority.

3. Reputation of the website and content creator

Reputation can be a combination of authoritative backlinks and non-linked mentions.

Here’s what Google’s SQR guidelines says:

Reputation is about what outside, independent sources say about them. It is about how others view the website and who is behind it. A website’s or content creator’s reputation can also help you understand what a website or content creator is best known for.

Backlinks and authority signals are definitely at play, but also how your website is mentioned from non-linked sources (e.g on a forum).

Here’s her blog getting featured in an authoritative lifestyle publication with a backlink:

And on a soap making forum that mentions her blog:

These are factors that contribute to the website’s reputation.

Facts and common misconceptions

Let’s clarify some common misconceptions that have been floating around and pen down the facts here.

1. AI-generated content is fine

Misconception: The helpful content update aims to tackle AI-generated content. If I did not use AI to create content, I should be safe from the update.

Fact: Google does not care how your content is produced whether it is written by AI or by hand. The helpful content update aims to reward truly useful content that provides a satisfying experience and suppress low-quality content that have little value.

Source: Google’s search guidance about ai-generated content

The HCU aims to reward high quality content with valuable information, whether that is ai-written content or by humans.

Similarly, it aims to suppress and demote content with low-added value. It does not matter whether the content was written by humans or machines. Low quality content is low quality no matter how it is produced.

2. SEO-first content is not the same as SEO optimized content

Misconception: Google does not like content that is optimized for SEO. I should not do any SEO optimizations anymore since Google is cracking down on search engine-first content.

Fact: Content that is optimized for SEO best practices helps Google understand your website. Google even has their own SEO fundamentals guide. SEO is recommended to help search engines better crawl, index and rank your website so people can valuable information through search.

But Google does not want people to find bad content that is written by websites without real subject matter expertise or do not provide a good user experience. There are site owners who simply create content with low added value to attract traffic and make money with adsense, this is the gist of ‘SEO-first content’ that this core update aims to suppress.

General recommendations to recover from the helpful content update

Here are my general recommendations about the helpful content update and ideas to improve and safeguard rankings.

1. Evaluate correctly. Check if the traffic drop is surely because of an unhelpful content classification or the normal state of search competition outranking your website.

A website classified as unhelpful would see ANY content on the website suppressed. To recover, you need to lift the unhelpful classification on your website. This requires removing bad content, adding authenticity and building a positive reputation of the website. This is different from normal competitive SEO and trying to outrank your competition.

2. Identify the pages with the biggest difference in organic traffic. Then, identify what are the keywords that have led to the article’s traffic drop. Use any of the 3 methods in this article to pick the most affected pages and keywords to improve.

3. Assess keyword ranking change. If your keyword rankings have lost a few positions or pages, evaluate who has ranked above you. Who has Google promoted or have managed to stay unaffected by HCU?

Look out for those websites’ reputation and their written content. Long-form content do not necessarily rank better now.

4. Assess keyword rankings that have vanished. If your page has completely LOST ranking positions, this means Google has removed your page completely from the search results. It no longer ranks in the 100 pages on search.

If your content provides any YMYL advice, this is an indicator that your content lacks trust, credibility and accuracy.

5. Review the high quality main content (MC) details from the Search Quality Raters guidelines. This is what Google looks for in high quality content.

Go back to the blog post case studies section above.

6. Build a positive reputation for your website. Reputation is a combination of authoritative backlinks and non-linked mentions. What other external websites and forums say about you contribute to your reputation. A positive reputation helps your website’s quality.

Google mentions these as great sources of reputation information:

• News articles
• Wikipedia articles
• Blog posts
• Forum discussions
• Rating organisations

note from me

If you have been negatively impacted, the only next step is to move towards recovery. We don’t know how long that will take but let’s get back up and get moving! I plan to keep this post updated as new website reviews come in and as I come across more SEO situations.

So come check back from time to time.

My hope is that this case study would help us understand the situation better by reviewing websites and Google’s documentation. The objective is to recover and safeguard our Google rankings!

Now this is all possible because of content publishers out there and the opportunity you have provided by sharing your site and analytics. To everyone who has participated in this study and submitted your site for review, thank you for letting me be a part of it.

If you want to contribute to this case study and help us understand the HCU impact, you can submit your site for review here.

And if you would like 1:1 help with your website SEO, reach out here.