Google On Fixing A Few Pages To Recover From Helpful Content Update 👎

John Mueller from Google responded to a question on Reddit about the likelihood of fixing just 10 pages out of 20,000 pages on a site, how that might help that site recover from the Helpful content update. The site owner said only 10 pages were hit by that September helpful content update, and asked if the 10 pages can hurt the other 20,000 pages on the site.

The question summed up at the end was, “Can an HCU hit on 10 pages cause a sitewide classifier for 20K pages? Or on May 7th reputation abuse update may had an impact?”

John replied “The issues more folks post about with regards to core updates tend to be site-wide, and not limited to a tiny subset of a site.” He added, “but I wouldn’t see those 10 pages as being indicative of something you need to change across 20k other pages.”

He also added that any changes you saw in May is probably unrelated. He wrote, “The last core update was March/April, so any changes you’d be seeing from May would be unrelated. I’m not sure how that helps you now though.”

John then went on to say that maybe what you learned from those 10 pages can be applied to the 20,000 other pages on the site. Here is how he put it:

Based on the information you posted, it’s also impossible to say whether you need to improve / fix something on those 20k pages, or if the world has just moved on (in terms of their interests, their expectations & your site’s relevance). It sounds like you did find things to make more “helpful” on those 10 pages, maybe there’s a pattern? That’s something for you to work out – you know your site, its content, its users best. This isn’t an easy part of SEO, sometimes it’s not even about SEO.

We know the helpful content update is sitewid but we also know that with the March 2024 core update Google wrote, “Our core ranking systems are primarily designed to work on the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand the helpfulness of individual pages. We do have some site-wide signals that are also considered.”

So with the helpful content being swallowed by the core update – there are some elements that are still sitewide.

I am not sure how much this helps anyone but I figured I’d share it all.

Forum discussion at Reddit.