Opinions on GSC, HCU and other related issues.
So I have my main site that is currently 3 months old. Prior to the HCU update, it was starting to pick up and impressions/clicks were taking off. I also had a few articles on page 1 on Google.
As an experiment during the HCU I set up a 2nd site with the intention of never actually developing it. The sole reason was to see if 'copied' and AI content would work better post HCU as that seemed to be the trend at the time.
I have a few observations and I'd like to know what others think.
Google Search Console
This is my main site since 2nd October. I have 40 articles on this site. As a comparison, I was getting this many impressions per day (200+) around a month ago. Any pages that were ranking have fallen off the face of the planet. All the posts are still indexed yet some are getting zero impressions whatsoever.
This is my 'experimental' site for the same period which has 5 articles. One of the articles has pictures, youtube video and is created in the same way I'd create a blog post. The other articles are literal copy and paste from AI with headings. There is NO internal linking on this site. In effect it is a scraped/spam/parasite site. Now bear in mind, I have no intention of doing anything with this site and I don't intend to add to it at all.
Both sites have author boxes in the blog post and other than the title and a very slight difference in subject matter (same niche), they are the same setup in terms of layout. No ads are being served on either site.
A Few Questions
So the main question here is why is a 3-month-old site with 40 articles getting fewer impressions than a site that was set up on 29th September that has 5 articles?
It doesn't make sense. I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this.
Secondly, within GSC for both sites, I've noticed that if I look at a page's impressions, there are maybe 190 for 1 page. If I then drill down to the keywords that are driving the impressions to that page, they total around 40 impressions for all keywords. A big difference of 150 impressions.
What is going on there?
HCU Has Penalised Me?
My general thoughts are that I've been penalised in some way by the HCU although it's relatively too early to tell with the site being new. I just can't get my head around what is going on (as most probably can't either).
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has a site at a similar age (3 months) and how their impressions are faring recently. Also, any insights into any aspect of this from anyone more experienced would be good too.
Chris
Recent Comments
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I don't think your site has been penalized because you're still getting impressions and clicks Chris. My nature site took a huge hit as did many others. Jay has a great series where he analyzes this and helps people make a recovery. Often times Google updates hit good sites too and it can eventually correct itself.
I’ve had 1 click and just over 200 impressions in 2 weeks. In the previous 2 weeks period I’d had over 800 impressions and 8 clicks. That doesn’t make sense
That sounds like your ctr and keyword positions fell and unfortunately it's totally normal when a site gets hit with an update, but it's not a penalty. Penalty would be when your site completely stops showing impressions and disappears in Google.
To give you an example, one of my keywords I was ranked #1 for had 50k impressions a day with 1k clicks fall to 5k impressions and like 80 clicks. In your example your impressions rose which is actually a very good thing to see.
Many sites have been hit hard by this update and I speak from personal experience in knowing how frustrating it can be to climb back up. I've been making incremental improvements bases on Jay's guidance in his premium classes and I strongly recommend doing that too.
These kinds of hits happen and having been in this business for so long, it's normal and you can climb out of it. It's how I've been able to do this for so long and continue to grow in spite of these set backs.
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Hi, Chris
These data sets are too small to make definitive conclusions. If you don't have any manual actions or security issues in GSC, then just keep going and try to synchronize your content as much as possible with Google's HCU.
Frank 🎸