HCU Helpful Content Update Recovery – Try This

Helpful Content Update Recovery – Try to Recover

If you have a good quality website and you have been hit by the HCU helpful content update by Google then try fixing it by doing this.

Delete all your videos from your site. If you have embedded videos in your posts and pages go through and delete every single video.

This may or may not work if you have not embedded videos responsively into your site.

I’m not sure why this works but it certainly worked on this website. I tried a ton of things for ages and nothing made a difference.

I was changing content, changing urls adding profiles and checking everything I could possibly think of. I was constantly resubmitting site maps to Google search console and resubmitting pages as well.

I also trimmed back all the Adsense from the pages that had ads on them to the bare minimum. But this didn’t make any difference either.

Then I read somewhere on X that deleting videos from your post and pages makes a difference.

I only had 20 videos on my site so it was quite easy to delete them all. I did also have a bunch of messages under the video section under Google Search Console.

So I deleted all videos from the site then I resubmitted the site map and resubmitted a few of the posts.

Within 24 hours it totally turned around. All of a sudden my posts started ranking again for the keywords that I had before.

Over the next 2 to 3 days it continued to improve. I’m not sure why it does this there must be some sort of bug about video from the update but it certainly helped this website so if you’re at a loss and you are at wits end then maybe try this and see how you go

If it made a difference to your website post a comment below to help others. It it would be great to know what happened.

Other Things You Could Try

• Delete all pages that don’t have much content
• Make sure your site has no spelling errors
• Make sure your images have ALT tags
• Add a Bio about the writer to your blog
• Delete topics that you have written about that you don’t really know are expert in the field
• Remove ads from posts and pages if they are all over the page or post. Just have a limited amount of ads.
• Change all your images to WEBP format
• Ensure your website has AMP or is optimized for mobile if you are not using WordPress

Please note if you have a spammy type website with lots of ads and poor quality content this may not work. But if your content is generally good and your pages are laid out well and you have videos on pages and posts then it’s worth trying this. All the best.