> Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.
> Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.
Google is flat out refusing to lift this penalty on people's sites for 7 straight months now.
This is absolutely insane and Google is putting 100% of its faith into an LLM algorithm (the "Helpful Content Update") that in of itself has a token limit and thus cannot read the entire page. On top of that, seven months is a long time and a lot of people will have worked on their sites to remove and/or update their content to have less fluff, etc. And yet Google is refusing to push an update.
From what I have seen in various places, Google has ruined thousands of livelihoods without giving people a second chance, all of which has been done automatically without human supervision. If this were to happen to big publishers, you know for a fact that where would be a class action lawsuit ready to go by now.
> Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.
> Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.
Google is flat out refusing to lift this penalty on people's sites for 7 straight months now.
You can read about that here,
https://www.seroundtable.com/no-hcu-yes-core-google-update-r...
and also this tweet:
https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1775495481604358363
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This is absolutely insane and Google is putting 100% of its faith into an LLM algorithm (the "Helpful Content Update") that in of itself has a token limit and thus cannot read the entire page. On top of that, seven months is a long time and a lot of people will have worked on their sites to remove and/or update their content to have less fluff, etc. And yet Google is refusing to push an update.
From what I have seen in various places, Google has ruined thousands of livelihoods without giving people a second chance, all of which has been done automatically without human supervision. If this were to happen to big publishers, you know for a fact that where would be a class action lawsuit ready to go by now.