JunkCarsUs: HCU recovery from 30-50 to 400-500 clicks a day

SeoProfy’s write-up of its work for JunkCarsUs is a rare named example of a site that lost most of its traffic in the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and later regained a large share. It states daily click ranges and page counts rather than only percentages. We read the case study page directly and report only what it says. The work and the measurements are SeoProfy’s, not ours.

What happened to JunkCarsUs after the helpful content update?#

The client is a US car removal and recycling site, about 10 years old, running in English and Spanish. SeoProfy says traffic fell sharply after the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and kept falling through the October 2023 core and spam updates and the November 2023 core update. The site had 600-800 daily users before the drop and about 100 users a day when the engagement began in March 2024.

The March 2024 core and spam updates then removed most of what was left. SeoProfy puts the site at roughly 30-50 clicks per day after them.

What did SeoProfy change first, and did it work?#

The agency found the main problem in content: state, county and city pages shared the same body text with only a few values swapped, and some pages were more than 90% identical inside the site. It also found identical reviews pulled from one database on every page.

The first round covered:

• Better content templates and a review block limited to nine, in varying combinations.
• HTML template fixes, 404 repairs and removal of needless 301 redirects.
• 410 status codes for pages with no traffic in six months.
• A backlink review that added suspicious domains to the disavow file.

SeoProfy states plainly that these changes did not produce the expected result. Traffic kept declining and settled at 30-50 clicks per day.

What turned the recovery around?#

The second round was more drastic. The agency switched off the Spanish version, which had almost no traffic, and returned 410 for all its pages. It removed blog articles that earned no traffic, mostly 300-500 word news notes, and rebuilt internal linking without commercial keywords in anchors. Total pages fell from about 4.5K to 2.7K.

It then submitted reindexing requests through the Indexing API within a 200 URLs per day limit. SeoProfy reports 2447 of 2700 sitemap pages indexed, over 90%. Link building continued with branded or diluted anchors on automotive sites.

What results does the case study report, and how far can you trust them?#

The first positive movement coincided with the August 2024 core update, and SeoProfy reports about 400-500 clicks per day at publication, with most optimized categories back in the top 10. Its headline claim is over 500% organic traffic growth.

Read this as one documented engagement, not a recipe. Several changes shipped together, so the case study cannot say which one mattered. The timing next to a core update is also a correlation, and the figures come from the agency that sells recovery services.