Authority Hacker Podcast – AI & Automation for Small biz & Marketers

#346 - Hot or Not: Test Your HCU Radar

Sep 23, 2024

Dive into the interactive game of Google Update Roulette where intuition meets SEO insights! Explore website performance, including a travel blog’s take on Singapore Airlines and the impact of algorithm updates on traffic trends. Discover challenges that small content creators face, alongside strategies for recovery and the importance of user-friendly design. Highlights also include shifts in online publishing dynamics and how outdated sites must modernize to stay relevant.

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INSIGHT

Big Creator Brand Power

Large creator brands can boost small review sites despite mediocre design or layout.
VacuumWars rose dramatically after Google’s August 2024 core update due to its strong YouTube brand presence.

ANECDOTE

Small, Sloppy Site That Stayed Stable

Betabox looked low-effort and small but its traffic remained stable and slightly up over time.
The hosts found many short, possibly AI-like posts yet the site avoided major update impacts due to small scale.

ANECDOTE

Travel Blog Hit Hard Then Partially Recovered

Sendspotter, a travel flight-review blog, had big traffic swings and was gutted by the March core update.
August helped a partial recovery, but traffic stayed far below its prior peak.

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In today's episode, we are playing Google Update Roulette.

The rules are very simple:
1. We give you a URL and you have three minutes to open it, look at the site and decide if it went up or down with the recent Google update.
2. You are not allowed to use any SEO tools to look at recent trends, backlinks or traffic, just your gut feeling, clicking around and Googling things.

Play along, count your your points and let us know what your score is in the comments.

And if you're not interested in playing, don't worry.
There’s a lot for you in this episode as well, because each of the examples that we are going through is symptomatic of a major change that we've seen with the August 2024 core update.
And we'll go through a short analysis of what happened and other sites that have seen these changes too, once we reveal the answer for each website.

So whether you're looking to play along or you just want to know what has changed with the recent Google update, there is something for you in this episode.
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Host: Gael Breton & Mark Webster

Full show notes:
https://www.authorityhacker.com/podcasts/346-hot-or-not-test-your-hcu-radar/
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A special thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Digital PR Agency, Search Intelligence.
https://search-intelligence.co.uk/
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