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Did sites recover after the HCU? Amsive's 400-site tracking

Amsive tracked about 400 sites hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and found no known significant recoveries by late March 2024.

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Key takeaways

  • Amsive monitored about 400 sites hurt by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and further hit by the March 2024 core and spam updates.
  • As of late March 2024, Amsive reported no known significant recoveries among sites negatively impacted by the September update.
  • Google says some changes can take effect in a few days, but confirming a site is helpful can take several months.
  • Google adds that if a few months pass without effect, the site may have to wait for the next core update.
  • Amsive did not publish how the 400 sites were selected or per-category counts, so the result cannot be generalised to all sites.

How long does a site wait to recover after a Google update, and does it always recover? The most direct public evidence is a tracking exercise by Lily Ray at Amsive, published on 26 March 2024. This piece reports what that analysis did and found, and what it cannot show. It belongs with our core updates coverage.

What Amsive tracked

Amsive monitored roughly 400 sites hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update, and further hurt by the March 2024 core and spam updates, using the Sistrix Visibility Index. Its headline statement on recovery: as of late March, there were no known significant recoveries among sites negatively impacted by the September update.

The article also shows that not every loss was algorithmic. It describes a gaming site with no indexed pages after 8 March 2024, which points to a manual spam action rather than a ranking change. It reports a similar case in technology and software, where one of the biggest losers of the September update appears to have received a pure spam manual action during the March update.

Which patterns did Amsive see among the sites that fell?

Amsive grouped the sites by category and listed recurring traits. None of these is a confirmed Google signal; they are what the affected sites had in common.

  • Ads and affiliate links: excessive ads that disrupt the user experience, such as video auto-play and vignette ads, and heavy affiliate linking without evidence the products were actually reviewed.
  • Missing E-E-A-T evidence: no named authors or author biographies, no sign of real staff or experts, and in some cases AI-generated authors.
  • Templated, AI-heavy content: highly templated title patterns, and in the MP3, ringtone and lyrics category, articles scoring up to 100% AI-generated in Originality.ai, or pages with no main content beyond a title and an embed.
  • Category-wide declines: calculator and converter sites in information and research, and VPN and security review sites in technology. In travel, even some bloggers with real experience lost traffic, which Amsive flags as an open question.

What changed in March 2024

On 5 March 2024, Google announced the March core and spam updates and folded the helpful content system into its core ranking systems. Amsive quotes Google’s accompanying guidance that there is no fixed timeline for seeing ranking improvements after removing unhelpful content. From that date, a helpful content recovery and a core update recovery are no longer separate questions.

What Google says about timing

Google’s core updates guide does not give a recovery date. It says some changes can take effect in a few days, but it could take several months for its systems to confirm a site is producing helpful content. It also says a site need not wait for a major core update, because smaller core updates ship continually, and that a site still unchanged after a few months may have to wait for the next core update. It adds that there is no guarantee changes will have a noticeable impact.

How to diagnose a drop, per Google

The same guide sets out a method. Wait at least a full week after an update completes, then compare that week in Search Console with a week before the rollout started. Review top pages and queries and judge the size of the drop. A fall from position 2 to 4 needs no drastic action, and Google recommends not changing content that already performs well; a fall from 4 to 29 calls for a deeper assessment. Google also warns against “quick fix” changes made because an element was rumoured to be bad for SEO. The update frequency report shows how often those windows come round.

How to read it

The two sources agree on one point: recovery has no fixed schedule. Amsive’s result is a snapshot of sites already hit, about six months after the update, so it shows that recovery was rare in that window, not that it never happens. Treat “no known significant recoveries” as a status report from March 2024, and check the Amsive page for any later updates before citing it as current. For one documented later recovery, see the JunkCarsUS case study.

The evidence

Sample
About 400 sites; selection method not disclosed

Hypothesis: Amsive set out to identify common patterns behind large ranking declines among sites hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and the March 2024 core and spam updates, and to see whether any of them had recovered.

Method: Amsive's SEO team monitored roughly 400 sites affected by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update using the Sistrix Visibility Index, then reviewed how those sites moved after the March 2024 core and spam updates, grouping them by site category and inspecting individual cases such as deindexed sites.

Findings

  • As of late March 2024, Amsive reported no known significant recoveries among websites negatively impacted by the September Helpful Content Update.
  • Sites in the sample lost upwards of 50% of their SEO visibility over the year, and several of the worst-affected travel sites showed drops of 90% or more.
  • Some declines were not algorithmic: at least one gaming site had no indexed pages on Google after 8 March 2024, consistent with manual spam action.

Limitations: Amsive does not disclose how the roughly 400 sites were selected, the visibility measurement window, or how many sites fall in each category, so the aggregate cannot be reproduced. Sites were chosen because they had already been hit, which biases the sample toward non-recovery. The check ends in late March 2024, about six months after the update, and says nothing about later recoveries. Sistrix visibility is a modelled index, not first-party traffic.

Sources

  1. 1.Google's Helpful Content Update and Ranking System: What Happened and What Changed in 2024? - Amsive, March 26, 2024Primary
  2. 2.A guide to Google Search ranking systems and core updates - Google Search Central

About the author

Adam Hafez
Adam Hafez

Founder, UpgradIQ FZC LLC

Adam Hafez works on technical SEO and search measurement: how pages get crawled, indexed, ranked and now quoted by answer engines. He founded UpgradIQ, which reads Google Search Console and GA4 to tie ranking movement back to the changes that caused it. He publishes what the data supports and states the limits of it.

  • Technical SEO
  • Search Console and GA4 measurement
  • Answer engine optimization
  • Structured data

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