The Google August 2022 Helpful Content Update has started - Let's keep track of everything here

[Dark Hat 007]

The update is over, so what did you experience? Please share with us. I didn't experience anything.

 

[webmaster2222]

Still volatile

 

[Daxir]

Dust seems to of settled on mine and I can find zero patterns. This update is supposed to be a site wide thing. meaning if one of my pages is outranked by one blog, the other pages should be as well but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Im now being outranked by some forums, sites I’ve always beat, and some new sites I’ve never seen before that have the EXACT same structure With extremely broken English articles. I’m talking “you will want to being looking out for this because it may be becoming very big problem later” stuff.

One of the biggest slaps in the face is google wants you to have some kind of niche to your site. They reward “expertise” apparently. Yet 5 of my 37 lost top 3 keywords are being beaten by a site with a name like klrmekrdopl.com with articles all over the place. One will be about trees growing, the next is about fixing an iPhone and the next is about cooking lol.

I just can’t find any pattern whatsoever why some sites passed me and some of my keywords will still beat those same sites.

Anyone else who’s been affected noticed stuff like this?

exactly the same here

win vs reddit/forums for some KWs, lose for others

lost positions on KWs that have been ranking #1 with no fluctuations for a year against some rando sites i ve never seen before, pretty sure some are even abandoned

 

[popbradley]

exactly the same here

win vs reddit/forums for some KWs, lose for others

lost positions on KWs that have been ranking #1 with no fluctuations for a year against some rando sites i ve never seen before, pretty sure some are even abandoned

one of my keywords is now being taken by a site with close to 300 words. I’ve never seen the website before but the article is dated 2016 lol. Was the weirdest thing to see.

Some sites are beating me, and they are a lot higher authority, and I’m ok with that. Not the random new websites, forums with no info, and clearly AI written websites.

 

[Daxir]

one of my keywords is now being taken by a site with close to 300 words. I’ve never seen the website before but the article is dated 2016 lol. Was the weirdest thing to see.

Some sites are beating me, and they are a lot higher authority, and I’m ok with that. Not the random new websites, forums with no info, and clearly AI written websites.

yep that seems to be the common theme

also losing to some higher authority sites that are only indirectly targeting the KW (not in H1) that i was beating before due to having higher relevance

 

[lunapt]

Hallelujah.

My website had 11k indexed in GSC but site:

Google results showed declining 4k visibility to 700 a few days ago since update started.

As of today it sat at 11.6k visibility for over 4 hours so I think it's stabilized.

There's hope people!

 

[jacksi]

Site traffic dropped by roughly 10% immediately after update and has been down like that for couple weeks.

Just started picking back up 24hrs ago and is now back to where it was before. Seems to have had none or slightly positive impact thus far.

 

[popbradley]

I’ve been gaining keywords back but my traffic is still a decent drop. According to my serp tracker I’m now only about 10 keywords down, most are not even high traffic keywords, but traffic has stayed down about 25%.

I honestly think this is because of some secondary keywords and because snippets are now taking some of my spots that didn’t have snippets before. Hopefully more keywords come back and my traffic starts to increase again.

 

[nakamura]

Nothing changed, Google is still full of shit. They should roll back to their 2014 algorithm

 

[Dark Hat 007]

Nothing changed, Google is still full of shit. They should roll back to their 2014 algorithm

Well, they just rolled out another update.

 

[popbradley]

Yep. I just saw a new one is happening. Is this the "we messed up some stuff" update? or will this be another "F the people who got hit AND the people who didn't" update lol.

 

[Daxir]

can't wait to lose another 40% of my traffic