Looking at a site hit by the HCU and Core updates

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi there and welcome to episode 89 of SEO is not that hard.

Today I'm going to be talking about a site that I looked at that's been hit by the HCU, the Helpful Content Update and the recent core updates. The founder of this site is called Nate Tate and he's been making lots of posts on Twitter, being quite open and public, about the effects the Helpful Content update back in September and the recent Core update have had on his traffic to their site from Google. Now their site is called travellemmingcom and, as far as I can see and as far as Nate is saying to people, this is all human-written content. It's a travel site. It's got writers who are all generally locally-based people and they're writing from their personal experience, using their own photography, all their own words, all the kind of writing as they believe for real people with real content. So they're not a spam farm or an ai farm, um, and they seem very genuine in what they're doing. And you know, nate's been very genuine with how this has affected him and his site and his writers on twitter. And I've been looking at the um the site on and off for the past couple of weeks since it came across and just a couple of days ago I saw Nate posting on Twitter about how a particular page wasn't ranking.

This is a page about Seattle, in Washington, and I had a look at it and some people were giving him some suggestions on how they might improve the content on it. But I took a look at it as well and I noticed that they've got at the top of the page a whole number of jump links to various bits within the article. So the article is covering various things on Seattle. So this one page was covering quite a number of things. So it was covering things to do in Seattle, sites and attractions in Seattle, outdoors attractions in Seattle, free and cheap attractions in Seattle, cool and unusual attractions in Seattle, rainy day attractions in Seattle, food and drink in Seattle and FAQ on general things to do in Seattle. Each one of those was like a jump link in the top of their page. Now I thought there looks like a lot of content here.

I actually sort of cut the content out of the page, stuck it in a Word document and did a word count and it's almost 9,000 words, so that's a very long page by anyone's stretch. I then thought, right, let's have a look at what kind of keywords and questions people are going to be asking around all these different categories they've asked. So I put it into keywords people use and did created as one, two, three, four, five. About seven or eight different people also ask searches based on those jump links to the various parts of the page and that got me about 240 odd different questions that people could ask about that and I then clustered those keywords using the cert clustering functionality on keywords people use to find out how many URLs and what URLs were ranking for each one of those and how Google was clustering all those keywords together, because obviously this one page is trying to hit all sort of 250 plus questions plus goes how many other keywords. To me it just felt like is there just too much going on on this one page and that I know that Google says it wants content to be helpful for people and in lots of cases, like I mentioned the other week, some people are doing too little on a page and I was saying they need to bring more together in single pages. But I think this is the opposite end of the spectrum where you could take that too far and there's too much on one page to really be concise on anything and you're probably Google is thinking this is too unhelpful because there's too much content on here for people to find what they actually want.

And when the clustering process ran, it actually split out all those sort of questions that were relevant to that page into 45 different clusters, so that's essentially almost that could be. Up to 45 different pages would be ideal to rank all that content. So that's really going in the complete opposite direction. You're splitting it into lots and lots of pages. Some of these clusters were obviously bigger than others, but to me it just looked like there was too much. Yeah, they're trying too much on a single page and if you looked at the actual crawl data the sites that actually were ranking for all these keywords and obviously we've got Reddit and Quora at the very top, both of which were ranks for 166 of the keywords over 110 unique URLs and Quora ranks for 143 of those keywords over 107.

So you can see how Google's not trying to rank just one page for all this content. It's actually splitting it out. There's a whole bunch of different pages. And the next one down, the third one down, one down trip advisor, which is probably a good result for this. They were ranking for 98 of those keywords over 59 pages. And then the seattle times, which you probably expect would rank for some of these things. Yeah, they've got 68 keywords. They're ranking for over 48 pages. Now, travel lemming themselves do actually rank for some of the keywords.

Um, I just need to find it on here. So bear with me a second travel. I mean, here we go. Uh, yeah, they rank for 15 keywords over six urls, and but these are all over. These are different pages than the one that um nate had mentioned in his thread on Twitter.

So these pages that were ranking were ones that were more specific around certain things. So one is, for example, was a Seattle food page, so that was ranking for a couple of keywords around food and it was a page just about food, food. So again, this is where I think that, in the case of this site, they've gone too far in one direction in terms of having the amount of content on a page. It's just become too much, and almost to the point where Google's saying, actually there's so much content on this page we don't really know exactly what it's about. And even if we did rank it for certain questions or certain keywords people are using, how would those people necessarily find the right part of the page to answer their questions? You know that you're sort of giving them another task to then search within the page. So, yeah, I think it's an interesting one.

I will share a link in the show notes. I actually did a short video for nate where I went through this and I posted it on youtube and I also shared him the keywords list that I used and also the clustering results, so you can go and watch that video. You can then look at the keyword list and the visualizations of the clusters and then all the grouping of clusters and all the competitor information there. That's all available to see on our site, you don't? It's just a plain link. There's only for logins or anything like that anyone can view it, but I say it's worth a look because it's an interesting take on why this one particular site has been hit, because I say they're still ranking for some things around these keywords on other pages in the top 10.

So they're not, although their traffic has diminished hugely, there are still bits of their site that still seem to be ranking, but not these big, huge guides that they created. So maybe their situation is they need to look at how they structure guides. I would also, having done some further research, they've got lots of other pages on seattle which are again big, of these big, long pages that the the interlinking between them seems weak in places, and it might just be that they need to sort of re-evaluate the structure of their content, how much they're trying to rank, how much content they're trying to get on each page and just maybe have a bit more of a logical architecture where it's more tightly focused on each individual topic they're trying to aim for, rather than these guides that seem to look like they could potentially be cannibalizing each other as well as having too much content on each one. So but I'd just like to share this on the podcast because I find that an interesting exercise and I think there are some things to learn from it. And I say, if anyone's got similar issues with a helpful content update, a core update, they've been hit and they'd like me to take a look at any of these. Just drop me a message details in the show notes and how to get a hold of me, and I'd be very interested to have a look before I go.

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