Hit by the HCU, rewarded by the March Core

Every "recovery" is just a mirage

Author

Ian H
May 06, 2024

Without a doubt, this is the rarest traffic pattern right now:

The above site was hit by the HCU and saw a 71% decline in traffic.

But when the March Core update rolled out, traffic actually increased by 49%!

In every other case I’ve seen, a site hit by the HCU was again hit by the March Core update.

So… what site is this and what did they do??

Sponsored Ad

Shopify SEO Hack

The app uses Google's API to send pages directly into the index. This means you dont have to wait weeks for Google to crawl a new or updated page. If you are serious about SEO then this is a must have Shopify app. All you need is a Google Search Console account to get started, and the setup is just one click.

The site is fossbytes.com.

It covers everything tech-related.

Yesterday, Hisan Kidwai, who currently writes all of Fossbytes’ content, shared the site’s recent success with me on Twitter.

I asked him if he’d done anything in particular to fix the site after the HCU, to which he responded:

He explained a bit more in another tweet:

So to recap, Fossbytes’ strategy has been to double down on what’s already working. Since their Snapchat articles rank well, they’re building a large content cluster around Snapchat and focusing link-building efforts to that cluster.

That approach is what always worked in the past.

But ever since the September HCU, any site doing that without a SERIOUS reason to exist outside of providing information, was absolutely decimated.

Even Fossbytes was hit and dropped by 71%.

So what happened in March? Why the sudden traffic increase?

Let’s dive in…

One theory is that social signals were dialed up with the March Core update. I’ve noticed that many sites with a strong and active presence on multiple platforms saw a nice boost.

Fossbytes has 7.7 million followers on Facebook, and posts multiple times per day. Most posts get hundreds of interactions. They have a large audience elsewhere, too: 426K followers on Instagram, 57K followers on Threads (!?), and 13K on Twitter/X.

But social signals may have nothing to do with it.

Diving deeper into the data, I noticed the traffic increase was largely due to one new article Fossbytes recently published.

An article about “Snapchat planets”.

Here’s Ahrefs’ guess of Fossbytes’ top pages, showing the percentage changes since March 6th (the day the March Core update began rolling out):

The blue line is the Snapchat Planets article

This granular, page-level traffic chart clearly shows Fossbytes’ recent traffic increase is due to just one article taking off (if we assume Ahrefs is accurate here). A few other articles saw a nice little boost, but those are now dropping off.

Obviously, this can’t be considered an HCU recovery. But it does show that it’s possible to publish a new article and rank on the first page - even on a site hit by the HCU.

So far, I’ve seen zero true HCU recoveries. If you see a traffic chart that looks like a recovery, be sure to dive into the page-level details and you’ll likely find it wasn’t an actual recovery after all.

Will we ever see a true HCU recovery?

My guess is yes, but not until another major Google update or two.

John Mu claims recoveries are possible. But who knows at this point!

I keep bringing this up in my emails, and I’ll say it again. Don’t rely on Google for traffic. There are tons of other fantastic traffic sources out there. Be like Fossbytes and diversify!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

P.S., I put together a list of the 50 sites (monetized with Amazon Associates) with the highet % traffic increases after the March Core update, and a list of the 50 with the highest % decreases.

You can see the 50 winning sites here and the 50 losing sites here. Enjoy!

What did you think of this email?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Things you might be interested in: