Were You Really Hit By the Google HCU Update? How to Tell

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Just because your site’s lost traffic from Google doesn’t mean you were hit by an update. It can mean a few other things, and it’s important to know which you’re dealing with.

Several of my websites have lost a lot of Google traffic over the last couple of years. I assumed at first they were losing rankings due to Google updates.

But I’ve done some testing, and I don’t think that’s the whole story now. Here’s how I tested, and what I recommend doing.

Testing For Google Penalties

The simplest way to eyeball this is:

Go to Google Search Console
Click “Search Results” in sidebar
Change the date to “Last 16 months” (you need a long time span to see it)

Now look at the chart. Do you see any cliffs where the traffic fell suddenly, or just a gradual decline of traffic? Let’s look at one of my sites.

The red arrow is a cliff. That tells me the March core update for spam and low quality directly affected my site.

So I looked back at the September 2023 HCU update, which you’d expect to have impacted me if my site is spammy, right? Well, if it wasn’t pretty clear Google’s lost control of the algorithm and it’s now doing all sorts of incorrect stuff.

But there’s no cliff in September 2023. Just a gradual decline. I saw this with the Penguin update years ago, and I believe it’s the same problem: sites that link to me were affected by HCU, and those links have been devalued because those sites were deemed unhelpful content, and that makes my backlinks profile weaker to Google.

As nonsensical as it sounds, I think I did not get hit by HCU. I only got hit by the March core update for spam and low quality sites. This matters because while no one has made any serious recovery from HCU, you can recover from core updates.

Now taking a look at another of my sites:

This site hasn’t been hit by any update. It’s just a steady decline, except for the winter holiday blip of high traffic.

Good news, right? Well, it means Google sees the site as valuable. But that site has lost 80% of its Google traffic year over year, and that didn’t happen for no reason. So I investigated further.

Look at Rankings

Open a private browsing window and start Googling for your top Google traffic posts. I’ve done this periodically for years, so I go into it with an idea of where I was ranking before.

What I see on both sites:

I’ve fallen from 1 to 2 on a couple of important terms. That’s something I can work on.
For a lot of terms, I’m outranked by Reddit, YouTube blocks, and PPA blocks. I don’t think that is anything I can fix. I think that traffic is gone unless Google changes something, and they seem to like it the way it is now. For these terms, being #1 is like being #7 years ago.
For a few terms, I’m outranked by big authority sites – cable channels, famous magazines, that sort of thing. I believe Google has decided being a big offline brand means you should rank better. We can’t fix this either.*
Ranking in carousels is no longer worth it.

*Yes, you can build a small brand, but that won’t compete with Nike, Target, Amazon, Forbes, or the Food Network.

As I’ve said before, the SERPs aren’t sending as much traffic to any of us as they used to, and there’s no indication Google plans to fix that. Google has been legally declared a monopoly, and all I see is them doubling down on brand authority, pushing their own properties (YouTube, carousels of affiliate links) and those they have big money deals with (Reddit, DotDash-Meredith).

Current leadership at Google is… not the people who made it great. I believe they’re in that inevitable phase of grow-or-die corporate evolution where they’re making a big cash grab before the company collapses in a heap. If the US government doesn’t break them up, it’ll be the market moving to AI or something. Their days are numbered. We are the last thing on their minds.

Fixing What I Can, But Mostly Pivoting to Other Traffic

My solution to this?

Find Other Traffic Sources

Nothing can send as much traffic as Google, so that sucks. I’m trying to grow all of the sources at the same time, which means they’re all progressing slowly.

But they’re also all run by algorithms that can turn on you anytime. I’ve always tried to cultivate other traffic, but now it’s all I think about. I rarely look at my Google traffic or keywords or keyword reports. I focus exclusively on what works with social media and email.

A few recommendations:

This chart is the Mediavine stats for traffic sources from one of my sites in a lower RPM niche. There are some really interesting takeaways.

Email traffic pays weirdly, wonderfully high RPMs. You can’t completely tell it from this chart, so I’ll explain below.
Pinterest traffic also pays weirdly high RPMs, much higher than Google. Aim for Pinterest traffic as much as you can, because that traffic is valuable.
Flipboard and Bing also pay much higher than Google, lower than Pinterest and newsletters.
Facebook traffic pays less than Google, or at least that’s true for me so far, but I’ve only recently started getting enough for it to show up in this report. I’ll update the post if it changes.

Email: in the chart above, Rasa and Grow send out my newsletters. Mediavine has trouble calculating the RPM for some reason, but you can see how high the CPM is. From my own calculations, I think they’re sending traffic at an RPM of about $59, which is way out of line for the niche this site is in.

If you’re going to have to work hard at new traffic sources, I recommend tackling them in this order. If you’ve had experiences of other traffic sources sending high RPM traffic, put it in the comments below!

Optimizing Old Posts for SEO?

Until about a year ago, I could always outrank even the big brands on a lot of search terms on Google by just improving my posts on-site. Now that no longer works.

I’m optimizing for readers now, mainly because I have some old posts that need updating and better-looking photos. I do not believe any amount of on-site improvements or backlinks or any old SEO tricks work anymore.

I’m also generating new posts – and even starting new sites – because social media loves new content. Every quality post you put online may or may not generate much revenue, so it’s a numbers game. Put out enough content, and eventually you’ll have enough hits to bring in the revenue.

Content Quality

Remember when we were told content was king? If that was ever true, it isn’t now, or we wouldn’t have big brand affiliate roll-ups beating out independent sites that actually buy and review products (read more on HouseFresh).

Content quality is not going to get you anywhere with the current Google algorithm. But it is what top paying advertisers want, according a recent Mediavine webinar. It’s also what readers want, not that anyone follows websites like they used to.

When I write, I imagine my audience reading it and focus on telling them what I believe they came here to read. That’s all. I don’t knock myself out thinking about keyphrases. What even is a keyphrase for this post?