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Top HCU / Google Classifier Recovery Stories
Posted by on February 18, 2026 at 4:55 pmWe're looking for people to share their recovery stories.
A few ideas have been shared on X and Reddit that users can
- Build a new domain and redirect some/specific pages
- Redirect via another sacrificial domain (u/godofseo – Charles Floate)
- Massive PR Campaign to get Google to lift a manual classifier
- Removing Ad Sense/affiiliates
- Re-targeting
- Building new backlink sources
- A combination of the above
Things that have been proven to be untrue
- Technical and "content" audits
- Pruning
- Fixing site errors
If these worked, you likely did something else wrong
Rules/Warnings: This is not for vendor case studies and unproven claims.
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1 Reply
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Great so nothing new or unique? Just basic SEO and a weird disagreement with technical maintence? Got it.
We really are blessed to have such a wealth of intellectuals in the SEO space
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Next month will be 2 years since my 15+ year rental marketplace lost 99% of its traffic overnight. As far as I can determine, my mortal sin was using AdSense Vignette ads, a Google product. Thought I would have recovered by now, but nope. Google is apparently playing the long game with HCU, and I keep improving my site, hoping for a recovery someday.
As for recoveries, I’ve yet to hear of one that wasn’t related to a media ruckus.
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