HCU to August Core Update traffic changes for 2,398 sites

I’m tracking the traffic changes for thousands of ad-monetized sites to see how they fare during this August Core update.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the raw data with you.

I was lucky enough to save Ahrefs traffic data for all Mediavine-monetized sites back in October last year, which means I can compare those numbers to the current traffic numbers in order to identify possible HCU recoveries.

Unfortunately, I didn’t save traffic data from September, but October is pretty close. Most HCU-hit sites were still nowhere near rock-bottom in October.

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Okay, here’s the spreadsheet with the traffic data for 2,398 Mediavine-monetized sites (it only includes sites getting at least 5,000 monthly visitors): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JXNk20VCwERNGXUad2NSDMhrGvyAWrClSNpSaefaMzM/edit?usp=sharing

As you can see, there’s a column for traffic on October 20th, 2023, August 15th, 2024 (the start of the August Core Update), August 22nd (today), and then the percentage change from the first two dates until today.

You can sort and filter the spreadsheet to gain all sorts of insights.

I sorted the spreadsheet by greatest percent traffic drop since 10/20/23. There are multiple sites with drops of more than 95%. And some of them have 100%+ gains since the start of the August Core update!

Such as independentgolfreviews (.com), which is down 97% since October, but up a whopping 714% since August 15th! 😅 

To identify possible HCU recoveries, you can filter the last column to show between 20% and -20% (you can adjust this) and sort the second-to-last column by greatest increase. This will show sites that are at nearly the same level they were in October last year, but that are up since August 15th.

To filter the spreadsheet, click the chevron above the column header, click “Create a filter”, and then click the filter icon and fill in the details as shown in this screenshot:

After looking at the traffic trends in Ahrefs for a few of these sites, I still don’t see any true HCU recoveries.

The top site is the closest to a true HCU recovery, but it’s still down over 50% since September. Besides, it wasn’t hit very hard during the HCU (compared to most sites) as evidenced by the bounce after the November Core update.

Enjoy digging through all that data. There are tons of valuable insights to be had!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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