Speaker 1 0:02

Hello and welcome to episode 69 of SEO is not that hard . I'm your host , ed Dawson , the founder of KeyWordsPeopleUsecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . I'm an affiliate marketer , seo , and I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years . I've built sites from the ground up , bought sites and sold sites in large exits . I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today , I'm going to talk about how getting hit with a Google penalty can affect your traffic .

Speaker 1 0:33

Today's podcast is inspired by a Twitter thread that I've been involved with last week with Carl Broadbent . Now , I've mentioned Carl Broadbent before on the podcast in the episode where I talk about which podcasts I listen to , and Carl's podcast is one that I do listen to . Carl , if you don't know him , he's a UK based content publisher affiliate and he has in the travel space and he got quite badly hit by the helpful content update and has lost about 80% of his traffic . Now he recently did a podcast where he suggests that he feels like he's been throttled by Google , that Google have set a limit on the number of visits that his site can receive per day because he's been within sort of 10 or 20 visitors a day . It's been very constant . The number he gets . It might be 100 or 200 visitors , I don't know the exact number . I think you might have mentioned it in his podcast . I will put a link to both his podcast and the Twitter thread in these show notes so you can go back and look at both of those . So Carl went out onto Twitter and said I feel like I've got this throttling that's happened to me and I'm being limited in the amount of visits I can get a day . Does anybody else feel like this ? And there's quite a few people popped up and said similar stories . They're getting very similar amounts of traffic every day . They got hit by the helpful content update and now they're getting very similar levels every day , almost as if Google is saying you can have X number of visitors a day and then we're going to turn your traffic off .

Speaker 1 2:13

Now I can see completely why it might feel like that . I mean , I've spoken before in the podcast about times we've been hit on our sites with Google penalties and Google updates in the past , particularly around things like the Panda updates and the Penguin updates back in the sort of early 2010 , 2013 time , that kind of period . Now , yes , seeing those huge traffic drops does feel like you've been picked on personally , but you haven't unless you've had a manual action , which can happen . Google can actually pick on people personally and that's when they give you a manual action and that's when it will show in your search console that you've had a manual action . But most of 99.9% of people who get hit by Google is an algorithmic update and algorithmic penalty . So the HCU helpful content update is algorithmic .

Speaker 1 3:08

Now , obviously , what happens when you get hit by these is your rankings get dropped massively . So you might be ranking from ranking really well , like we went from ranking number one for the term broadband to ranking 999 . I mean , we've just got a very last page . If you went all the way down to like the 1000 results , we went overnight and obviously that has a massive impact on your traffic and you'll see a big , huge drop . But when these things happen , you'll still probably get a little bit of traffic from Google .

Speaker 1 3:41

There'll still be the odd term that , even if you've been hit by a penalty for that you're going to rank for , and this happened with us when we had Penguin . There's still the odd term we still ranked okay for , but it brought very little traffic and it did look like you were kind of throttled . We're going to get 100 visits a day or something , and it's like that all the time . But that's just because that's the natural level of traffic on those one or two terms that you're still ranking for , and those terms tend not to be ones that are very competitive . They're not ones that tend to drive huge amounts of traffic or fluctuate much with you know , sort of seasonal effects . So it looks very much like oh yeah , I'm getting 100 today and that's it , or whatever the amount is a day and that's it . But if you go down and look at it and look at the times of day your traffic's coming , you'll see that if it was just saying you can have 100 and then stop , you would see all your traffic coming at the first part of the day and then it would stop . That's a throttle . The throttle is you have a hard limit per day and then it all ceases . And that's not what happens with these things .

Speaker 1 4:54

When you get hit by an algorithm , what you're actually seeing is a different effect . It's not a throttle . They haven't set a specific amount per day for your site . What they've done is they've just dropped your rankings , they've depressed your rankings . They've put like a negative classifier against your site and your content so that instead of ranking where you would have done before , this new classifier says you've hit this helpful content update classifier , so we're gonna apply a minus , whatever penalty . So this isn't necessarily gonna be a minus so many places . It will be a minus on the , because essentially every website , every web page in Google will have a certain score for every query .

Speaker 1 5:37

So if your page comes up as being one of the potentials for results for a query , you'll get scored and then they literally will score it on that number . It will be decided how they place things in the rankings in the SERPs and when you get hit by a classifier like this , it will literally take that score and then decrease it by a certain amount . It might be a physical number , it might be a percentage , but whatever they used to do , they will take that original ranking and then remove it down and suppress it . Now that is how it drops your rankings , because you essentially just disappear as far as most people when they're searching . They just won't see you because you've been buried so deep . If you're on the first thousand results already , you might get pushed even further out than that . So , yeah , so , while it feels like a throttle , it's not actually a throttle . They're not actually specifically deciding you can have X number of visits per day . They've just pushed you so far down the rankings that you're not getting any visits on most of the things you used to . But the odd anomaly , the odd page that still has got enough going for it that it still ranks enough to get a little bit of traffic and it's just that amount of traffic that comes is really quite stable . So , yeah , you can get that kind of feeling that it's a throttle , but it's not a throttle . It's a dampening effect on all your rankings and that's what causes the issue .

Speaker 1 7:04

And if you've been hit by the helpful Update , I truly , truly understand your pain . I've been there , having been hit by Google updates , and Know how devastating it can actually be and how it affects you at the time . Now , if you want to hear more about how we were affected , how we got out of it and the sort of the story since and I would say , go and listen to episode 5 of seo , is not that hard and it's called the story of broadband code at UK and that covers you know how we started , brought up good at UK , but then also the major event which was when we got hit by the Google Panda and penguin penalties , which had meant that we had to like . You are now with helpful content update . You have to reevaluate how you Create your site , how you create your content , how you put it all together to Get out of the situation you're in . So that's a really good one . I'd suggest anyone who wants to sort of hear a story of how it's overcome Go and listen to that one .

Speaker 1 8:08

Now Google themselves have recently their search liaison , danny Sullivan , has actually posted some very interesting updates on how the helpful content Update classifiers work . So I'll just go into that right now . I will post a link to this tweet I'm going to talk about in these show notes , and this is a tweet last Friday , february the 9th , and by Google search liaison , who's Danny Sullivan , and he says the classifier is always running . If it sees a site is reduced on helpful content , the site might start performing better at any time . I e maybe someone made a change to reduce this several months ago . The classifier is checking , checking , checking and basically says oh , I kind of think this has been a long-term change as the assessment shifts . It's not like you have to wait until the next time the classifier itself might get updated . We do update it from time to time to make it better , but sites that improve could see change independently of that .

Speaker 1 9:03

So what he's saying here is Basically you haven't got to wait till the next helpful content update is run To see an improvement , because this is how Previously , say , when it was Penguin that hit sites , you could do all the work to get To say , get links removed , things like that . But it won't be until it ran again . That it would . You would see any positive effects of the changes you've made , and this happens on a few things , I think a few updates . Sometimes they just run once and then , no matter what you do , you're not going to see any changes until they run that update again .

Speaker 1 9:40

Whereas here Danny , saying that you know they're constantly evaluating sites against the helpful content classifier and If they see that you've made changes , that now means just your content is helpful . They will potentially Start raising in the rankings . But the one qualifier that he puts in there is that is that they want to see these changes . Stay for the long term . Now he doesn't specify how long the long term is . Could be weeks , could be months . I suspect it's probably months . But what they're saying is you know , if you make these changes and then they stay , then we'll start to raise you up . And I think this is because they don't want people to probably be able to experiment to see how far they can push it . They probably don't want people to Be able to make a change to be helpful again and then put lots of unhelpful stuff back in and try and bounce up and down the rankings . I think they want to see it as a long-term thing , which I admit is frustrating Because it's going to be very hard to know what changes you've made actually have any kind of effect now , as we're not seeing anyone as yet Say they've recovered from a helpful content update , or very few .

Speaker 1 10:49

If there are any , there's not a lot because there's not a lot of noise about it . Then I would suspect that whatever the period of time is , it's going to be in the months period . But you will start to see if people recover from this eventually . Like with all updates have ever seen , there's very few updates , I think , where people have never been able to recover . Some people give up and don't recover . That's a different matter . But you know , every major Change that Google's ever made , that I've seen in my . In my experience there's always been ways for sites to get out of it , given enough changes and enough time . So , while I admit I understand how frustrating is at the moment if you've been hit by this helpful content update , I think there is light starting to appear at the end of the tunnel and I think especially Danny Unsearch , liaison at Google , is trying to get more information out there to people and I think he's pushing the cause Because I think , of all the people at Google , he does seem to understand that . I think he understands that they've gone too far , really on this . So , yes , I think there just want to say there is still hope there .

Speaker 1 11:58

We have back to the original point of this podcast . Yeah , have you been hit by a throttle on your site ? If you've been , it had been hit by the helpful content update or any other Google update . Now , it's not a throttle , it's just that you're ranking to push so far down that it feels like that . But it's not a conspiracy against you that says you're only allowed X number per day . That's just the number that it's ended up at because of how far down your rankings have been pushed . Thanks for being a listener . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard . Is brought to you by keywords . People use calm these solution to find the questions people ask online . See why . Thousands of people use us every day . Try it today , free . Keywords . People use calm . You want to get in touch ? Have any questions ? I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel 5 on Twitter . We can email me at podcast at keywords people use calm why , for now , and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .