Recover from the last Google Helpful Content Update

Hi Folks,

Saw a lot of post saying that their rankings tanked after the last Google Helpful Content Update.

I was amongst the unlucky ones that got hit hard, and being in the gambling niche where it's highly competitive. I was really stressed out after the website literally hit rock bottom.

Some context on the website:
1. It's a gambling niche site focusing on EEAT only.
2. No backlinks were used.
3. Built on August, and started getting 100 clicks upon creation.
4. Was banking in hard until the recent HCU.

Made some changes here and there, after tanking in rankings.

Right now we are bac and better than ever! If you have any questions, ask right away!

GSC screenshot

Good job! What did you change?

I've analyzed the sites that aren't getting any hit after the HCU, specifically the ones that are still ranking and started ranking high. Compared their content structure with mine, as most of my sites are one-page and heavily focused on ranking one keyword. So it makes it easier for me to do research on content gap.

The way I do it is like this:
1. I added some content that are missing comparing with my competitors.
2. Wait a few days and see if the rankings changed.
3. If rankings and impressions are not changing, I'll start to remove some of the contents that were in my website and not in competitors.

Generally the advice is this, identify the underlying ranking factor based on the content of your competition. Decide whether its applicable to your site then slowly improving over time.

I have had around 40 similar sites, some tanked, some remained stagnant and some had a huge boost.

But for the ones that tanked, these are the methods how I recover from it.

How can you get 100 clicks when just starting?

It's all about keyword research and identifying keywords that has low volume on tools like Ahrefs but actually has high search volume.

A common tactic that the casino uses to market their users in certain GEOs are SMS, users will always search for it.

With this information, i tried to identify the website that gained a lot of traction through certain sources.

I have a good sense of what a good on-page is like for this niche as well as throughout keyword research, and I believe that to be the contributing factor for the success within a short amount of time.

Proof of the site that gets 100 clicks on the first day of ranking and it started on 7th of August:

Would you use a tool like Sufer to try and match the top-ranking websites?

Everything was restored in my country on 12/23/13. I did not make any changes to my website.

I really do not think that is hcu. Looks more like a problem with your reporting or indexing.

Looks strange, hard to really know what's going on.

That's not HCU. The dates don't even match. You either got some messed up reporting or something happened to your website and got it deindexed.