Hey Reader

If you've been involved in affiliate or niche sites in any way for the last 12 months or more, you don't need me to tell you how tough it has been this last year.

Google went to war with small publishers last year but are we now experiencing a cease fire, or even better, all out peace and love?

I reported on X at the weekend that one of my sites was seeing not just page one rankings, but position one rankings return.

Yesterday, I then saw even more positive movement - and when I examined my portfolio more closely, I saw that 5 of my sites were on the rise.

In this email I'm going to share the commonalities between them, the types of keywords I'm seeing return and why I think one of my sites has seen the biggest reversal.

Before you get too excited, this is not a full reversal by any stretch of the imagination and this is very early days in the Core Update that has prompted it... so if you haven't seen this on your site yet, don't panic (yet), and if you have seen an increase in rankings - don't celebrate (just yet) - as everything is all still to play for in this update - and an apparent Google bug that is still unresolved - so who knows what could come later in the month!

My 5 Sites

I currently have 14 sites in my portfolio. 3 of these I started after HCU.

Two of my sites were not impacted by HCU (probably because they were quite new as of Sept 2023) so we are going to say I have 9 sites that were impacted in some way.

5 of those 9 saw signs of reversals since the latest core update was announced - and two of them saw upward swings followed by downward swings in the few weeks before the update was announced (when I believe Google was testing the update) - you can see these swings in the Search Console graph above.

These 5 sites that have seen an improvement are all pure affiliate sites. No display ads (there never were any) but they are very heavily monetised with affiliate links.

Some are UK, some are US focused and one is built on a aged domain.

What's Ranking Now?

So far, across all of these sites I've seen a higher percentage of page one rankings return for my aged domain site and my UK site that was built from scratch since 2018.

What's interesting here is that 'best' terms such as buyers guides don't seem to be making much of a comeback - at least not as far as page one, whereas review terms have largely come back to top 3 or top 5 positions.

For these review terms I'm not seeing much in the way of forums, but I am seeing forums ranking for the 'best' buyer guide terms.

Whether that changes as the update continues to roll out will be interesting to see.

What I Did To Recover...

If this update continues in this way then you are going to see a lot of people publicly showing reversals and recoveries. You may also see people trying to sell courses or consultations off the back of these.

Stay away from these.

At this point, I don't think it is possible (yet) to ascertain what has prompted these reversals - but here's my take for free...

The HCU tag has been made less important or there are triggers to make it less impactful on some sites (and this can be detected algorithmically)

I don't think the HCU tag has just been made less important across the board - otherwise we would see ALL sites recovering.

Instead, I think what is likely is that Google has taken sites like Retro Dodo, House Fresh etc. that are considered decent content sites, and found factors that can be identified and applied algorithmically that align with these sites and are now rolling that out.

This would explain why these sites saw the first recoveries - something that many said was likely manual.

My recoveries cannot be manual.

Perhaps one or two could - but not all. At least two of my recoveries probably don't deserve it. I've done literally nothing to those sites. But perhaps they already had enough positive signals to trigger some level of recovery.

My biggest recovery is my aged domain site. This has three things going for it that my other sites don't:

1. A really strong backlink profile
2. Invested a lot of time in growing the YouTube channel and this sends traffic to the site and the videos also rank on Google
3. Invested a lot of time with my editor updating and re-fact checking the existing content

If I had to guess though, I'd say 2 and 3 are likely the main triggers here. It also looks like affiliate terms have come back more than info terms - and with Google now rolling out AI overviews more widely I think the info type content is more at risk than ever before.

I'll likely make a video on this and go in to more detail as the month progresses - and I truly hope if you have sites affected then you start to see some reversals.

Like I said earlier, it's not time to panic just yet if you've not seen a recovery - and this update is still very early days.

Until next week

Jason