September 2023 Helpful Content Update

I remember the day one of our clients, a 7-figure publisher, emailed us in a panic. Their organic traffic had dropped 82% overnight.

At first, we thought it was a data bug. But within hours, site after site - travel blogs, niche directories, thin review portals - reported the same crash.

We quickly realized that this wasn’t a fluke. It was the September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU), and it hit harder than anything since Panda.

What Was Broken

By 2023, Google’s results were flooded with mass-produced, template-style articles.

Pages mimicked human helpfulness but were clearly built to game the algorithm.

I'm talking about sites like rewritten Wikipedia entries, year-stamped listicles, SEO-optimized junk with no real value.

Worse, many of these dominated rankings.

The Helpful Content System (HCS), first introduced in 2022, aimed to reverse that trend. But it wasn’t until the September 2023 update that the gloves really came off.

This update didn’t just demote bad pages, it flagged whole domains. If your site had a substantial amount of unhelpful material, everything on it got suppressed. That included your good content, too.

What triggered this? User dissatisfaction.

Google wasn’t just measuring content anymore. It was reading user signals like abandonment rates and comparing engagement across sites.

Content farms were being filtered out, and more authentic sources were being elevated.