How recover from the HCU:
1. Completely change your understanding of what helpful content is.
Focus on truly understanding your audience and their needs.
2. Put yourself in the shoes of a searcher.
Click through the top ranking pages and critically evaluate if your content provides substantial additional value and insight compared to what’s already ranking.
Your content needs to provide “information gain” to rank well.
3. Create original, insightful content that demonstrates real-world experience and expertise in your niche.
Quick tips, original research, personal stories, and useful tools can help.
The content must be so good that people genuinely want to read it.
4. Remove or noindex thin content on your site that was created only for search engines.
Google wants to see a site that is truly helpful overall.
5. Demonstrate E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) through your content.
For some topics, first-hand experience is the most important trust factor.
User-generated content like forums can help showcase experience.
6. Strive to become known for your topic by creating content that is so helpful, people bookmark and share it.
Passionate enthusiasm that engages your audience is key.
7. Pay attention to YouTube, as Google is likely to further integrate YouTube Shorts to showcase topical experience.
8. Understand that while authoritative sites may still rank with imperfect content, Google’s AI systems are improving at identifying helpful content at the page level.
There are still opportunities for smaller sites to succeed by creating standout helpful content.
The path to recovery requires a major mindset shift to focus on creating content that genuinely helps users, rather than content designed primarily to rank in search engines.
A site that consistently produces original, insightful, trustworthy content is best positioned to overcome ranking drops from the helpful content update.