Google's John Mueller responded to a question on Reddit about the possibility of a site recovering from a helpful content update if it fixed just 10 of the 20,000 pages on the site. The site owner asked if only 10 pages were affected by September's helpful content update, and whether those 10 pages could potentially negatively impact the other 20,000 pages on the site.
The final question that was framed was, “Could an HCU hit on 10 pages trigger a site-wide classifier of 20,000 pages? Or could the May 7th reputation abuse update have had an impact?”
“Issues posted about core updates tend to be site-wide and not limited to a small portion of the site,” John responded, adding, “But we don't believe those 10 pages are indicative of changes that need to be made across 20,000 other pages.”
He added that the changes seen in May are probably irrelevant. “The last core update was in March or April, so any changes seen after May are irrelevant. I don't see how that would help now though,” he wrote.
John went on to say that what we learned from these 10 pages could then be applied to the other 20,000 pages on the site. He said:
It's also impossible to tell based on the information you post whether something on those 20,000 pages needs to be improved or fixed, or whether the world (in terms of user interests, expectations, and site relevance) has just moved on. You seem to have found something “useful” on those 10 pages, but is there a pattern? That's for you to solve. You know the site, its content, and its users best. This is not the easy part of SEO, and it may not even be about SEO.
We know that helpful content updates will happen site-wide, but we also know that in the March 2024 core update, Google wrote: “Our core ranking system is designed to work primarily at the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand the usefulness of individual pages, with some site-wide signals also being taken into account.”
So some useful content has been removed in the core update, and some elements remain across the site.
I'm not sure how useful this will be, but I thought I'd share it all.
Discussion on Reddit forum.