Patrick Garde

Absolute gold for HCU sites. “Pull back on the SEO” Go @CyrusShepard. With a shout out to @jonoalderson 🤣❤️ #AhrefsEvolve

Yesterday, some people chose to misconstrue what I said on stage at a conference that led to lies and conspiracies. I was able to get a recording of my talk so I can share what I actually said. I have nothing to hide here, so you’re all welcome to have a listen. on.soundcloud.com/SBNLe6iBe4…

These are the sites with the greatest % declines in Google SEO visibility between September 4, 2023 and April 22, 2024 (@Sistrix data) Gee, notice anything totally obvious, or is it just me? Sorry to anyone who works on any of these sites, I know a lot of you are seeing this. I just think the world needs to see this data. This is not meant to be a reflection or knock on anyone's SEO abilities... clearly there are bigger forces at play here.

Believe it or not, it's not just niche sites feeling the impacts of recent Google updates. Especially during the end of the March Core Update. These are 5 huge publishers, including a few that get a lot of flack from the SEO industry. Each has actually dropped pretty substantially since last September. If you combine the absolute values of the drops of these 6 sites, it's -295 @sistrix visibility points. For context, I'm including a screenshot of the sites with the greatest absolute visibility increase during the same timeframe (Sept - now)

I've got some bad news for affiliate/product review sites. It is not looking good with this Google update. I just dug into several examples where The Wirecutter, arguably the best product review site (section) on the internet, has lost positions in the last 2 weeks. The drops mostly stem from high-volume commercial keywords (50k+ MSV). But they also include many "best" keywords as well (e.g. "best bluetooth speaker") You might think "oh, maybe they were outranked by another product review article?" Nope. In every case I have found, they were outranked by an ecommerce site. Usually Amazon. And these are product/category pages on the ecommerce sites, not informational. Below I have shown 4 examples visually using @sistrix data. Red = affiliate/product review site Green = ecomm site Look how affiliate sites are dropping, either by several positions on the first 2 pages, or out of the top 20 entirely. Look at the distribution of green vs. red. *The update is still rolling out so this could change. But it is consistent with what Google has been doing with MANY updates over the years. And this is why doing SEO for product review sites is NOT THE SAME as doing SEO for any other type of website. They have their own unique challenges.

The billionaires are noticing

Sometimes I see people sharing examples of brand new sites showing rapid SEO growth via GSC screenshots or 3rd party tools. While the growth is usually quite impressive - I'd always approach these charts with the questions: "Is this strategy actually sustainable? What will the growth look like in 6 months?" It's not uncommon in our industry for SEOs to share screenshots of the site's exponential growth, but conveniently leave out the part where the traffic went crashing and burning months later. And some of these sites have been launched after the September HCU, but it doesn't mean they won't also be hit in a similar way when Google has collected enough data about the sites. Many sites hit by algorithm updates had extremely rapid growth beforehand, if not their greatest traffic levels on the days before the updates/penalties. @glenngabe and @thetafferboy have both written awesome articles about this lately (linked in comments). If your goal is to drive a bunch of SEO traffic within a 3-6 month period, then sure - these could be considered SEO successes. But I'd be careful using these sites as a model for what works or what doesn't work, if you're looking at ways to drive long-term SEO success. 3 months just doesn't give a clear picture of what will happen next.

I hate to say this, but my 30+ person SEO team and I just went through several examples of sites that claim to have super helpful content and were hit unfairly by the HCU. The consensus? A lot of the content on these sites was found to be... pretty unhelpful. Sure, some of the articles were decent (especially newer ones), but the archives showed all kinds of patterns of less than helpful content. Remember that Google was evaluating sitewide patterns with this update, not individual articles. I am not saying this situation is true for every site, but I think it's really important to remember that just because you think your content is helpful does not always imply that the majority of your readers do. I am also not saying the HCU didn't go too far because I still also very much believe that to be true. And I'm still waiting for this update to finish rolling out before sharing further opinions on that, but I do have them. Strong ones. But I just wanted to share the possibility that using real authors, writing in the first person, claiming to have actually tried the products or visited the place sometimes is *still* not sufficient to actually be sharing helpful content. I just read a travel article about visiting Barcelona and the best things to see there? Yawn. I've been to Barcelona many times and totally disagree with the writer's examples. I found them super generic, with no actual indication that the writer has recently been to those locations, how crowded they are, how awful the lines can be, etc. To me, THAT's helpful content. We looked at a few other travel examples where people on my team were either 1) from that place or 2) have visited that place. The articles included generic information, unhelpful/random affiliate links that could apply to traveling anywhere, checklists that lacked context, advice that wasn't relevant or updated, etc. We looked at product review examples where the content was indeed written by humans, but aside from saying "I tested this," it contained no actual first-hand guidance, no original ideas, no personal anecdotes, and no true experience or advice above and beyond what's included on other review sites. And before you @ me with "well the big sites do all those things too," yeah. I know that. The big sites were not hit by the HCU. The majority of their content did not fall into this category. Many of them have decades of history on and off Google. The rules apply differently. I am not endorsing this or saying it's a good thing, but those are the rules of the game. I plan to make a video about this but I'm sort of afraid I'll get my head chopped off.