They say a picture says a thousand words, and in this case, they ain’t wrong. I’ll just leave this Google Search Console graph here…

No doubt this picture - at least up until where the lines tick up - is familiar to many or most of you.

Total demolition at the hands of an algorithm, brought on by the Helpful Content Update, followed by other updates which brought the ban hammer down even more!

But only earlier today, I got curious to see if the seasonal boost (or “boost” you might say, for the past two years), I get annually on this site was maintaining past Christmas.

(In short, this is a niche where people search a LOT around Christmas!). And my traffic did increase.

And lo and behold, I spotted that it IS maintaining!

Or looks to be anyway.

Impressions are still up and so are clicks, even now, well after the Christmas meals have been cooked and enjoyed.

What’s even crazier is that this is a site that basically DISAPPEARED from Google up until a few weeks ago. When I searched the site’s URL - never mind its name - I couldn’t find it! It looked like Google had wiped it from their index.

Talk about unbelievable!

Now, the pages are back on Google and even crazier again - some of my previous top posts are now ranking on PAGE 1!!

Now, I’m not getting too excited (despite the exclamation marks). I’m going to see if this continues before I count them chickens.

But this is pretty amazing to see even as it is. Just the fact it is making any recovery is unreal. Now to be fair, the content is good, even if it targeting question-based topics and competing heavily with Reddit, Quora and YouTube.

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Over to you, what are your thoughts?

Have you seen anything along these lines - even a modest recovery following a HCU-pocalypse?

Just to note - I have done NOTHING with this site in a long time except for update the odd plugin.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there for now. If this trend continues, you’ll hear about it! And if it doesn’t, well….you know the rest :)

Chat soon,

Anton