Is your website being Throttled by GOOGLE? ( HCU UPDATE )
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2024
- Is your website being throttled or held back by Google?
After the Helpful Content Update, I have seen the same pageviews per day on two different websites.
How can that be possible?
Take a look at a tweet I posted on X, People are seeing the same results as me. Throttled traffic to their search traffic in Google search engines.
Are you seeing the same?
Tweet link: x.com/UKCarlBroadbent/status/...
What a unique idea. I hadn't heard of this concept before.
Me neither until last week 😂
I’ll have to go check now 😮
This is pretty much how Google explained hcu though in the first place. Your site will be tagged as unhelpful and it may take an other algo update/hcu for that to reverse. But obviously you will have to have removed the unhelpful signals for that to happen, and we dont know what they are.
I wish I knew 😂
Exactly same here. One blog in English, one in Portuguese. 1k+ before. Now both stuck at around 450 views per day. Your theory definitely makes sense. Hopefully another update is coming and things will improve a bit.
Let’s hopes it does roll out again and fix them but I don’t think it will
Same thing happened with me, before Google update I was getting 1500 visits per day (on 150 posts) and now I have published 250+ posts but traffic is only 400 to 500 per day.
Same here, my site is stuck at 30 visits per day against 300 before HCU. I am absolutely sure there is a guy at Google turning the knobs. Cheers
He’s a knob 😂 follow along with my new project. Might be good for you to try something new youtube.com/@SideHustleInsider101?si=WrfY63GJ62Cmnc96
If only they told us what pages were deemed unhelpful so we could rectify them, THAT would be helpful
Thanks, very informative Great content ❤
Could we call this as 'quota arrangement' based upon EEAT?
Thanks Carl. I don't suffer from a clear HCU issue like that but I did lose traffic over the last two years. I often notice something that seems like "micro throttling" in the real time analytics: patterns of 1 minute high traffic + 4 minutes of low traffic. Again and again, every 5 minutes. Can't be a coincidence. As if they open the floodgates for a minute and then close them to spread traffic evenly and prevent me from getting more than I deserve.
It’s all very strange
There is something to this. I think it's more in the way of throttling impressions you're eligible for rather than traffic, though. Previously we used to be eligible for the terms our page was relevant for, and now it seems more like - if your page is relevant and your site is eligible based on some eligibility score, then you get ranked. If your site isnt eligible, you wont (at least you won't rank in a zone that actually gets clicked on). Now here is the mind numbing odd part with the throttle: If you break a news story or write about a trending topic, you can use your entire impression budget on that, and your primary traffic driving pages suffer even more so. Isn't it "helpful" to be the first mover with a news story? Shouldnt the new performing article(s) supplement the existing traffic driving articles and drive clicks and impressions higher? For some reason it doesn't, which helps to validate your theory.
I one way I’m glad I’m right and in another I’m crying 😂 that’s for sharing your thoughts.
We’re all just guessing but it’s another possibility
Spot on
I just found this video and I feel like I've found my answer (without a solution) to what has happened to my 26 yr old website. I was getting over 10,000 visitors per day and since 2/1/2024, it immediately went down to 5,000 visitors. It's almost a perfectly straight line. Since mine just happened this month, could it still be the HCU though?
There’s an update rolling out now it feels like. Yours could have taken. Hit from that im afraid 😟
I do wonder, both my sites, unrelated, are kept under 100 a day. Normally the sites would get 10-15k visits a month. I updated my websites, added relevant info, removed fluff. No significant movement either up or down. I'm really sick of Google, honestly.
I've also had a keyword tracker for about two years, and pretty much daily one or more of my keywords get moved up and down the SERP. One of my keywords moves in 15 positions every day, one day it's higher in SERPS, another one lower. Some keywords get shifted like this by 30 positions and more. I'd get a jump like this over time, but every day?
It’s all strange but I’m seeing patterns from peoples responses.
Same with my 2 sites. Throttled to 500 session/days when it use to be 2500+.
Sorry to hear that
Yes! This is exactly what’s happened to some of my websites.
Sorry to hear that
Lol I have noticed this. It’s like they give you a set limit of the pie. 100% spot on
People seem to think there’s some truth to this.
Interesting, my site is also stagnet at a consistent (lower) number. Your theory explains a lot.
Sorry to hear that
Interesting observation. definitely strange behaviour from Google. Also , you might want to compare the traffic in search console by device mobile vs desktop. I was hit much harder on desktop.
Yeah it’s all a bit strange
I've gone from 2500 visitors per day last september to around 500 per day now. Done a ton of work on the site too. Interesting theory.
Sorry to hear that
Hmm. That’s an interesting theory for sure.
Just a theory. Who knows really
People said the same about panda - HCU and panda seem v similar. Experts might want to look into what happened to sites back then. Something HCU hit people have all done as standard and were encouraged by to do by experts in good faith 'cos it did work for years, is now toxic for sites, even good ones? It doesn't get a penalty or them banned but does get their traffic penalised in some way. I'm no expert but I was around back then and all this feels very similar.
......perhaps it's a way of making non committed niche website owners give up and not renew their domain names or hosting fees before reversing the update slightly making committed helpful sites recover?
Who knows Gaz. Lots of possibilities. Maybe just google has lost control of their algorithm
Mh, I wonder whether the people agreeing to the theory have really done anything meaningful to their websites since ... the event. 😱 Otherwise; it would be normal to find less volatility in clicks. Let's say, I had an avg. of 1000 clicks per day before. About 1200 on my best day, and about 800 on my worst. If I now haul in an average of 200 clicks (true story 😢) the volatility in the same percentage would be + 40 and - 40. On the "last 12 month" chart, this then looks like a pretty straight line. Just asking, bc. I myself hadn't the energy to do "big stuff" to the site - just too depressing.
All valid points. On one site I’ve done nothing and the other a fair bit. But it’s hard to get motivated when you see no results.
I completely revamped my site and none of it moved the needle.
Same here as well too
Sorry to hear that
Carl, how many high DR >50 b links does your main site have? I think this is the only game in town to recover.
Lots I paid £15k for plenty of haros. So I’d say 15-20 really strong ones
@@CarlBroadbent That's interesting... Does this include sites within your niche?
@@davec65 yes both same niche
Same here 😢
Crazy hey
Done with blogging.😢
😥 then follow along with my new side hustles youtube.com/@SideHustleInsider101?si=WrfY63GJ62Cmnc96
The HCU puts you in a sandbox for at least 3 months which means your site is supptessed fully during that time and can't recover.
Also ALL devaluations from ANY update suppresss your sites but the HCU is the only one where you are in a sandbox.
There is no 500 visit limit however. This isn't a manual action, it's suppression.
There's no such thing as throttling, but there is suppression.
But nothing will bring your site back until you fix the issues and you can't recover at all for at least 3 months, no matter what you do.
And BING traffic is not going through the roof they haven't even gained 1% market share since they added the chatGPT.
Traffic in Bing maybe but users are growing for sure.
How do you know three months. Mines been 5-6 months? With no change.
Have you seen the responses in twitter ? Too many similarities to be random.