HCU recoveries are finally happening

This explains why sites were hit in the first place...

Author

Ian H
June 10, 2024

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HCU recoveries are like big foot. You hear rumors about them, and some people have claimed to see them.

But I certainly haven’t, and I’ve seen no credible evidence they’re real.

That is, until just recently…

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Taleb Kabbara, one of the smartest SEOs I know of (and who bases his opinions on actual test results rather than speculation), recently shared this:

Some clarification:

Taleb observed that sites affected by the HCU were primarily targets of toxic backlinks (negative SEO).

Here’s a thorough explanation:

Supposedly, the reason sites are targeted by these toxic sites is because they rank for high value keywords.

So what’s the solution? Disavow those toxic links, and stop trying to rank for those keywords.

Taleb goes so far as to say that you shouldn’t target any keywords related to anything you don’t own. Google made a mistake by letting you rank for them in the first place, and wants to rank the “owners” of those keywords instead.

So for any brand-related keywords, only the brand can safely get away with ranking (without fear of getting hit by Google).

Here’s Taleb’s more thorough explanation:

This would explain why informational sites were disproportionately hit, and why other types of sites were more likely to survive.

What about for the sites that got hit yet targeted “ownable” keywords? Recipe sites that only publish original recipes for example?

I would ask two questions:

  1. Does the site have ANY pages ranking for problematic, high value keywords? These could be bringing the rest of the site down.

  2. Your site may not have been hit. It could be that Google decided to only show X amount of content sites for that particular keyword, and your site was deemed less authoritative or helpful and so it wasn’t chosen. We know this is happening more and more as Google tries to show greater variety in the SERPs.

I’m sure there are some arguments you could make or examples you could show to counter these points. If you have any, feel free to share, but know that I’m just sharing what I’ve read and heard from other people.

I fully believe Google is a huge mess at the moment, but if there’s a chance to recover, I figured I should share it!

This is just one more reason to pursue alternative traffic sources (in case you needed another reason).

Perhaps you can’t rank for high value keywords on Google, but you can still get plenty of traffic to those pages from Facebook, Pinterest, email, etc.

What do you think about this? Have you seen any true HCU recovery? Would love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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P.S. I’m planning to do away with the lifetime plan for Site Stats Database this week, as it’s not sustainable given my monthly costs to run it. If you want lifetime access, buy now before it’s gone.

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