How to Recover if you were hit by the 2024 March HCU : A Strategy I haven't seen discussed anywhere

elitebill

elitebill

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I did some research to see if anyone has successfully recovered from HCU (Helpful Content Update) and found some surprising insights.

Currently, a successful strategy involves buying a site that represents a real business and front-loading it with the content from the domain that was hit. According to a Google SEO leak, there appears to be a classifier for small publishers, making it futile to attempt traditional SEO tactics for recovery if your domain has been blacklisted.

I wanted to share this information as I’ve learned a lot from the forum.

Example:

Petkeen.com was severely impacted, dropping from a peak of 8 million visitors to just 2,000. Their recovery strategy? They bought an existing website of a real business in their niche, preferably one that is over 12 years old, and transferred all their content to the new site. For instance, they acquired Pangovet.com, added all the content from Petkeen.com, and on June 29, 2024, had zero traffic. However, within 12 days, according to SEMrush, their traffic surged to nearly 500,000.

You can see the details here: SEMrush Overview of Pangovet.

They've employed the same strategy with other domains like Dogster.com, and it seems to be the only way to recover. I plan to try this with a domain of mine that was hit.
 
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Yes, it’s surprisingly quick! The whole process can take as little as 10 minutes. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you out:

  1. Export Content from the Old Site:
    • Log in to your WordPress dashboard on the old site.
    • Go to Tools > Export.
    • Select All Content to include posts, pages, comments, custom fields, terms, navigation menus, and custom posts.
    • Click Download Export File. This will create an XML file and save it to your computer.
  2. Set Up the New Site:
    • Make sure WordPress is installed and ready on your new domain.
    • Log in to the WordPress dashboard on the new site.
  3. Import Content to the New Site:
    • Go to Tools > Import.
    • Click on WordPress (if you haven’t installed the WordPress Importer plugin, it will prompt you. Just click Install Now and then Activate Plugin & Run Importer).
    • Click Choose File and select the XML file you downloaded.
    • Click Upload file and import.
  4. Assign Authors:
    • During the import, you’ll be asked to assign authors. You can create new users or assign posts to existing ones.
    • Make sure to check the box to Download and import file attachments to bring over all your images and media files.
  5. Complete the Import:
    • Click Submit and wait for it to finish. This might take a few minutes depending on the size of your site.
  6. Verify the Content:
    • Once it’s done, check your new site to make sure everything transferred correctly.
    • Look through posts, pages, images, and other media to ensure it’s all there.
By following these steps, you can move all your content from one domain to another in just about 10 minutes. It’s a simple and efficient way to get everything transferred without any hassle.
 
elitebill said:
I did some research to see if anyone has successfully recovered from HCU (Helpful Content Update) and found some surprising insights.

Currently, a successful strategy involves buying a site that represents a real business and front-loading it with the content from the domain that was hit. According to a Google SEO leak, there appears to be a classifier for small publishers, making it futile to attempt traditional SEO tactics for recovery if your domain has been blacklisted.

I wanted to share this information as I’ve learned a lot from the forum.

Example:

Petkeen.com was severely impacted, dropping from a peak of 8 million visitors to just 2,000. Their recovery strategy? They bought an existing website of a real business in their niche, preferably one that is over 12 years old, and transferred all their content to the new site. For instance, they acquired Pangovet.com, added all the content from Petkeen.com, and on June 29, 2024, had zero traffic. However, within 12 days, according to SEMrush, their traffic surged to nearly 500,000.

You can see the details here: SEMrush Overview of Pangovet.

They've employed the same strategy with other domains like Dogster.com, and it seems to be the only way to recover. I plan to try this with a domain of mine that was hit.
Click to expand...
Nice and Informative! I have done with this and also recovered bunch from this, it really works
 
hammadians said:
Simply Add the backup of the previous one you can get all the content If you're on WP. And also at the end do some tweaks accordingly to you're new domain an got results.
Click to expand...
Doing that is easy, but my concern is...it wouldn't be a spam? just posting tons of articles at the same time?
 
That is interesting but be careful
Getting a whole website is a big move. Google may not like thiss sneaky trick and this plan might not last long. Make sure to make awesome user friendly content for your own website. Traitional SEO can help with getting your website back on track especially if your content was not really useful. Think about checking your content and making it better before trying to buy a risky website.
elitebill said:
I did some research to see if anyone has successfully recovered from HCU (Helpful Content Update) and found some surprising insights.

Currently, a successful strategy involves buying a site that represents a real business and front-loading it with the content from the domain that was hit. According to a Google SEO leak, there appears to be a classifier for small publishers, making it futile to attempt traditional SEO tactics for recovery if your domain has been blacklisted.

I wanted to share this information as I’ve learned a lot from the forum.

Example:

Petkeen.com was severely impacted, dropping from a peak of 8 million visitors to just 2,000. Their recovery strategy? They bought an existing website of a real business in their niche, preferably one that is over 12 years old, and transferred all their content to the new site. For instance, they acquired Pangovet.com, added all the content from Petkeen.com, and on June 29, 2024, had zero traffic. However, within 12 days, according to SEMrush, their traffic surged to nearly 500,000.

You can see the details here: SEMrush Overview of Pangovet.

They've employed the same strategy with other domains like Dogster.com, and it seems to be the only way to recover. I plan to try this with a domain of mine that was hit.
Click to expand...
 
Interesting. The domain probably had a lot of authority and backlinks. I would be interested in seeing someone from BHW test this and share their results.
 
people's takeaway from this helpful guide: buy business site to migrate your banned content to, because only business sites are ranking / will rank soon...

my takeaway 1: google's on a mission to blacklist all domains on the internet unless they're real businesses
my takeaway 2: parasites in suits (businessmen) that never produce anything only understand, like and reward their own kin

PS: really good guide, though! Well done OP! Regardless of what I think of google (which is very obvious) these tips are great
 
Its wierd, its just a typically 301 method to avoid the penalty, people use this trick from the early days.

They just happen to be the same niche, and 2nd domain is an old domain too, so it can hold up the tons of contents immediately, but its still too early to say, maybe quickly the domain get the penalty too, because contents are same.

If they made a signal like on the 2nd domain, they put on a banner and says "our business moved from domainA to domainB", and let Google knows this, and Google recognize this behavior, and life the ban, yeah that's possible, but I doubt Google has this feature...
 
Nice share.
8 million traffic is not a small publisher but got hit. They did the right thing and bought a real business, good for them.
Satanic_Frozen said:
I'd like to know how much they spent buying this aged reputable domain from a real brand
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Must be cheap compared to the losses due to loosing 8 million traffic.

Can this strategy be applied with a twist to sites with 1k, 10k, 100k traffic, without breaking bank? That's what we need to figure out.
 
Thanks for sharing this insight…It’s intriguing how acquiring an established domain and transferring content can impact recovery. This strategy has worked well for sites like Petkeen.com. Best of luck with your recovery!
 
elitebill said:
I did some research to see if anyone has successfully recovered from HCU (Helpful Content Update) and found some surprising insights.

Currently, a successful strategy involves buying a site that represents a real business and front-loading it with the content from the domain that was hit. According to a Google SEO leak, there appears to be a classifier for small publishers, making it futile to attempt traditional SEO tactics for recovery if your domain has been blacklisted.

I wanted to share this information as I’ve learned a lot from the forum.

Example:

Petkeen.com was severely impacted, dropping from a peak of 8 million visitors to just 2,000. Their recovery strategy? They bought an existing website of a real business in their niche, preferably one that is over 12 years old, and transferred all their content to the new site. For instance, they acquired Pangovet.com, added all the content from Petkeen.com, and on June 29, 2024, had zero traffic. However, within 12 days, according to SEMrush, their traffic surged to nearly 500,000.

You can see the details here: SEMrush Overview of Pangovet.

They've employed the same strategy with other domains like Dogster.com, and it seems to be the only way to recover. I plan to try this with a domain of mine that was hit.
Click to expand...
Good idea.

Actually transferring whole website to a new domain name and redirecting all pages with 301 works too.
 
petersonpol said:
Good idea.

Actually transferring whole website to a new domain name and redirecting all pages with 301 works too.
Click to expand...
Good strategy, and you can transfer backlink juice from sandboxed site, as long as it is not de-indexed.

But i will like to see at least 30 to 60 days, if traffic remains stable.
I also see that he is using some paid ads, which is another great act, as #1 spot traffic engagement on the website is highest and it is one of the factors of better rankings.

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I was in a similar case after the September HCU; the site was getting just over 30k visitors per month and then bam, pretty much wiped out. Despite revamping the content gradually, it really didn't move the needle to get it back to where it was before.
This February, I started a brand new site (brand new domain) and took the previously written but unused content for the old site and moved it to the new one. The result? It's ranking higher than the original site on the back of very little backlinks, and it's also outranking other more popular sites in the niche.
 
Seems interesting, I'll look up some closed businesses in my niche.


Hopefully these "new" domains aren't hit with that manual "small publisher" classifier
 
Ozzyzig said:
I was in a similar case after the September HCU; the site was getting just over 30k visitors per month and then bam, pretty much wiped out. Despite revamping the content gradually, it really didn't move the needle to get it back to where it was before.
This February, I started a brand new site (brand new domain) and took the previously written but unused content for the old site and moved it to the new one. The result? It's ranking higher than the original site on the back of very little backlinks, and it's also outranking other more popular sites in the niche.
Click to expand...
I think in your case, is that your new site has not been hit by any classifier yet so it ranks easily. And you are using unused content, not the 301-like method like petkeen. So simply speaking you just launched a new site. You are not trying to recover the old, tanked site. Although you can use AI to rewrite your old-content and republish them as new content on your new site, but the old site is still not recovered.

it's too early to say if your new site will be hit by any classifier later, but keeping launching new site till it gets hit and lanch more new sites is probably not a good strategy.

The obvious working method, for this HCU update, is to convert to a business site to rank again, but we don't know what google will favor in the next updates.
 
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