Quick tips for Google HCU-hit sites
Those sites that were hit by Google HCU (Helpful content update) and were either de-indexed or indexed by not ranking anymore in Google search engine or have been de-ranked in SERP, here’s are quick tips to recover from Google HCU.
If your site is still being crawled by Googlebot but stuck in “Crawled – currently not indexed”, try hugely reducing your indexed URLs by deleting (serve as 410) or no-indexing low-value pages, tag pages, category pages. This can decrease and shorten your site’s footprint enough to trigger a reclassification for the entire site.
Remember, the Google Helpful Content Update applies a site-level classifier — not page-level. If your site was labeled “unhelpful”, no individual page fix will matter until the overall classification changes. The key sign of potential recovery? Google is still crawling your site, which means it’s still on their radar. But you’ll need to add more relevant content which satisfies the user’s search intent. Discard long-worded articles. Keep article length upto 800 words or lower.
thanks Barry, your tip on recovering from google HC-U is quite helpful for me. I followed it be de-indexing all tags pages, and also few article pages that were not answering the actual user’s intent. In two days I’ve removed over 4.8K pages from my site, and seen Google re-crawling some important pages of my site and ranking them on page 2. It’s a slight improvement as those pages were appearing on google search on page 7 or 8. I’m hoping in a week or two google should rank some pages back to page 1.