Google’s December 2024 Spam Update caused a lot of movement among niche sites. Mostly downward movement, as usual.

13% of the 11,500 Mediavine and Raptive-monetized sites I tracked had traffic declines of more than 20%.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom.

5% saw traffic increases of more than 20%! 🙃 

In an effort to understand what types of sites/content Google rewards right now, I’m sharing a couple of the biggest winners among the sites I tracked.

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So…what did this site do?

As far as I can tell, the only thing that changed about the site was that the owner added a page with a few crochet-related calculators.

What’s interesting is that the calculator page isn’t getting traffic. Various crochet patterns suddenly are. Perhaps the calculators improved the quality of the whole site in Google’s eyes, which caused increased rankings?

By the way, Ahrefs shows the calculators were added on the 22nd. But I checked the actual page source code and the page was added on the 16th, two days before the traffic spike.

After the December Spam update, this site exploded and actually reached pre-HCU traffic numbers. This is an extreme rarity and perhaps the clearest HCU recovery I’ve ever seen.

What changes did they make?

It looks like there were tons of content changes over the past year. Layout improvements, clearer directions in the recipes, etc. Here’s an example from their highest-traffic recipe, comparing the latest version to the version back in July:

More recently, there were some content updates on the homepage, and the addition of a free downloadable eBook.

Simple content changes can make a massive difference. In this case, it was the difference between a dead site and a full HCU recovery.

I also checked the social profiles for this site, expecting to see some huge follower numbers. But to my surprise, Pinterest is their biggest account - with only 1,200 followers.

This goes to show that you don’t necessarily need to grow a large social following, like many of the most successful niche sites post-HCU have done.

So…what does Google reward?

Based on this extremely small-scale study, Google rewards sites that are making extensive improvements.

Whether that’s launching an eBook, adding entirely new features to your site, like calculators, or making many small but helpful changes to your content.

I should mention that plenty of high-quality sites were hit by the Spam Update, and making extensive improvements does not guarantee SEO success. But it’s worth trying!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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