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

petersonpol said:

Google has no power to confirm if the actual business is "real"

Click to expand...

petersonpol said:

They are displaying scam e-commerce websites from shopify in their shopping listings

Click to expand...

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: https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?searchType=domain&q=https%3A%2F%2Fpangovet.com%2F.

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...

aws39 said:

Our affiliate site took a significant hit in September 2023 due to the HCU. Since then, it has been experiencing constant declines and a lack of traffic. Traffic on the site has dropped by over 95%. Above three weeks ago, I moved the site to a completely new domain with no previous history, implemented a 301 redirect to the new domain, and transferred the content of the old site 1:1. In the first few days, the new domain started indexing quickly, traffic increased, conversions happened, and this lasted for a few days. Then, boom. Almost complete lack of traffic, the new site is currently visible for only a few keywords, the brand domain is not visible again, only through the domain address and with the syntax site:example.com. The entire process was carried out during the spam update, so the new site might have received some kind of filter, it could be the Sand Box. Unfortunately, this strategy did not work for long in my case. I think the classifier was moved from the old domain to a new domain. The site stopped being visible even for its own name. In GSC, the migration from the old domain to the new one is still ongoing. I don't know what to do.

Click to expand...

Davegnima said:

I’ve cloned my website on another domain and let the previous domain goes to 404 since I don’t think a redirect form a hit domain would benefit.
my new website is still not indexed after a week. What should I do?

Click to expand...

elitebill said:

Dogster and Caster are relatively stable, with $80,000 in revenue coming solely from Pangovet. When you combine all sources, the total could range between $100,000 and $200,000. It’s important to note that the content they’re using already existed on their other domains, so they’re not incurring costs for new content creation. Instead, they’re simply migrating existing content from one domain to another to maximize ad revenue.

If Pangovet were penalized today, they could quickly launch another business domain, transfer their 10,000+ articles within a few hours, rank the new site, and continue generating revenue. It’s a clever loophole they’re exploiting, as Google penalizes only the domain, not the content.

I imagine they’ll continue this strategy for years until Google starts penalizing the content itself, which could take a long time. Meanwhile, they don’t need to produce new content or hire a large staff—they can run this operation with just a two-person team. This approach resembles a churn-and-burn strategy, but in this case, even if they rank for only six months across three domains, it could easily generate $1 million in revenue. With a lean team and pre-existing content ready to transfer to new domains if the old ones are hit, they’re positioned to keep this going for a while.

Click to expand...

Davegnima said:

I’ve cloned my website on another domain and let the previous domain goes to 404 since I don’t think a redirect form a hit domain would benefit.
my new website is still not indexed after a week. What should I do?

Click to expand...

Honest Marketing said:

SE ranking where oct looks good so far, below is ubersuggest tho
View attachment 382754
View attachment 382755

I fint it intersting they redirected the old Petkeen.com homepage to a "rebrand secondary page" that says

PetKeen Is Now a Part of PangoVet.​

I do plan on moving a business and their content to a new domain but to try without redirects.
After a month if there is no uptick then implement redirects.
Might do an ai spin on the content so its not exactly the same too as an option.

Click to expand...

petersonpol said:

The only way to recover is to replace a domain name with a new one and 301 every page.

Click to expand...

petersonpol said:

The only way to recover is to replace a domain name with a new one and 301 every page.

Click to expand...

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...