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The More You Improve Your Site, the More Google Penalizes It
Posted by on January 4, 2026 at 6:24 amI have been running a site, and before the Helpful Content Update (HCU), it was generating over $5,000 per month, with organic traffic increasing consistently month after month. Since Google introduced the Helpful Content Update, the site has lost nearly 95% of its organic traffic and collapsed almost overnight.
Since then, the site has continued to lose traffic with every Core Update.The more I try to fix the issues and improve the content, the more Google seems to hurt the site.
It is extremely difficult to work 15 hours a day sitting at a desk to write content. Google scrapes content for its AI Overviews and then suppresses the original source website.
If you are a small publisher, forget about getting traffic from Google. Google has no ethics or fair rules for small sites. There is no level playing field for independent publishers. Google prioritizes and ranks sites with which it has exclusive partnerships.
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1 Reply
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I just had a look at your website and it is literally *the definition* of a spammy SEO blog. That ship has sailed years ago. There is no more money pumping out useless content to game Google’s search index. You are a “publisher” of content nobody actually wants, hence Google not showing you in search results. Time to move on to something else my friend.
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I won’t comment on your actual site – the general trend is that sites that merely repeat or riff off other sites are rapidly losing value to clean authoritative sites as search shifts to AI summaries. There has been a period of time where ordinary people without deep expertise could easily gain page views by writing interesting material and summaries and then playing SEO games to get on the SERP pages and monetise those clicks.
But the people who found those sites were not looking for that, they wanted info., and in recent years the tendency for the SERP to be dominated by Hyper-SEO-optimised sites aiming for clicks has been part of what has made search less and less appealing. It was only a matter of time before those chickens would come home to roost.
You mention that google is down-grading smaller sites in favour of the larger, bigger players. But another way of looking at it is that google is trying to provide people with reliable search results as close to the source as possible. Writing a blog post will in most cases not add any value to the info that can be found on more established and reliable sources.
Again without regard to your site (I have no idea about that), many SEO questions here are from people who had sites that managed to place themselves between the user and the answers by creating blogs and “content” and then monetising that. There’s no reason to believe that that could be successful in the long term. Being able to get in-between the users and the actual data without adding real value has little to no value to anyone. And the explosion of sites with hot-take opinions, facile reviews and derivative listicles has reduced everyone’s trust in the answers they are getting – and again supports the notion that that era is coming to an end.
JMTCW FWIW.
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Thanks for sharing and sorry this happened. I guess if a website prints traffic, it’s better to keep it as is
I’d recommend changing core things only after you see decline in traffic, not in anticipation
algo and traffic is so fragile nowadays
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Checked the site on mobile. It looks like a very basic SEO spam blog and it takes three seconds to notice that content is generated by AI without much editing. I cant see the links on navigation menu in mobile because social share buttons are on top of them. Ads popping everywhere. Cant really see why it should rank. Have seen many same kind of sites tanking in last few years core updates even though having solid backlink profile.
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HCU was 2023 October…Youve been trying for 2 years to get it back?
Should have abandoned it. Informational content is a thing of the past as LLMs and Google AIO has already scraped what they need. John M on the other hand still advocates for “fresh” content as he’d like for Big G to continue to scrape.
Your site is facing a soft-ban / sandbox style penalty. Not manual. Leave it and start a new project that focuses on a “service” in which google can’t just SCRAPE and present it in AIO. If anything you can do that since you can already back it up with informational content that funnels it up to your service pages.
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I don’t disagree it’s harder for small publishers HOWEVER
I have been reading comments from site owners like you for ten years and almost always (anecdotally) the site has no right to be ranking highly. You’re biased and perspective is skewed
If you rely on Google only for leads then that is simply bad practice
Why not be brave and post your domain so you can get an OBJECTIVE view of your site.
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Same here, we used to make $30k/m from our sites so I feel you
That 5% of your traffic is likely Bing, not Google. We’ve gone from 7 millions Google clicks a year to literally zero.
I’d suggest taking your skills and applying them elsewhere. I’ve started an agency working with eCom brands as the algorithm is fairly untouched here.
All the best
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HCU sites are just dead, and that was confirmed by John Mu
If you have skills, launch new sites asap, dont forget the 3-12 month sandbox, and build again -
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Not been my experience. Since I updated and improved my site, traffic went up by double, and triple digits
But my site is a storefront that sells products, and the blog is basically just a Latest Updates! and occasional useful technical info nobody else is talking about section. So I’m not strictly reliant on eyeballs or ad dollars for revenue
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It seems like what’s actually happening here is you were cheating the system for years and got lazy. Now you’ve been caught and want to play the victim.
It’s 2026. SEO spam (thankfully!) has no place in the rankings anymore. Make actual improvements or give it up, there’s no third option.
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