Web Creator Summit and Helpful Content Update

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Many Web Creator Summit attendees, dubbed "HCU victims," ​​expressed their disillusionment with the impact of this update on their sites. They said they saw a significant drop in search engine rankings and traffic, despite creating content they considered high-quality and user-focused.

Pandu Nayak, Google's vice president of search, acknowledged that the creators were trying, but also said he couldn't offer any guarantees: "I have to say I'm really sorry, it's not good at all. But I can't give you any guarantees whether your sites will recover or not. That would be irresponsible of me."

Marie Haynes, in her article “ What we can learn sri lanka email list from the Google creators summit for HCU impacted sites ,” notes: “Several attendees said they were told that their content was good, but Google’s systems couldn’t tell.” She was particularly struck by a tweet from Kim Snaith , who was one of the attendees at the meeting: “ We were asked several times how to tell a spammy website from a quality website. We were asked what features we thought Google should add that we thought were useful. Frankly, this wasn’t an event where we were going to get answers—Google wanted our feedback .”

Source: Luis Rijo, " Google's Web Creator Summit: A recap of insights and updates ". Published: 10/30/2024.

We first learned about Navboost last year in an antitrust lawsuit against Google. In October 2023, Pandu Nayak, Google's vice president of search, testified that there are "maybe more than a hundred" signals that influence search rankings.