My Thoughts on the Google Helpful Content Update

My tech website Tech Pilipinas was negatively affected by the recent Google algorithm updates, particularly the September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU).

From around 20,000 unique visitors per day in August 2023, my site's traffic fell to 5,000 per day in March 2024. Needless to say, my website's ad revenue fell by around 75%, too.

This isn't my first experience with Google algorithm updates. In 2019, my website's traffic fell by 60%, but I was able to recover after two years of back-breaking work.

I don't think I can endure another two years of recovery (if a complete recovery is even possible). I'm married now and I have a mountain of bills to pay. That is why I'm looking for alternative sources of traffic to make up for the loss of visitors from Google.

Thankfully, there's Bing and Yahoo. Together, they now surpass Google as the main source of traffic to my website. Most of my articles rank very high in Bing and Yahoo, but are buried under Reddit posts and spam sites in Google.

I'm still hoping and praying that Google will remove the site-wide classifier that's hindering plenty of sites like mine, and switch to a page-level classifier where individual pages are ranked on their own merits.

For now, I'll keep writing and working, and hoping for sunlight at the end of the tunnel. I'm not giving up because I still have a mission to help my readers with their tech-related problems.