How do I get out of Helpful Content Update?
Explore the case study "How did we get out of HCU September 2023 in 7 months using content pruning and link-building with a parasite in the supplement industry?"
- Helpful Content Update
- dietary supplements
- AI
- AIO
- content pruning
- SEMkrk
Case study Aura Herbals 🚀
domain
AuraHerbals.co.uk
Industry
Supplements
Market
B2B/B2C
Duration
from 1/05/2024 to date
Aura Herbals is a Polish manufacturer of dietary supplements, operating in one of the most demanding industries in the context of SEO - YMYL (Your Money Your Life, i.e. industries related to health and money). The company has been building its position for years, offering products based on natural ingredients and supporting consumer education through guidance content.
A team was responsible for the project on the part of our partner Aura Herbals, whose professionalism and hard work have significantly influenced the current success of the project:
- Adrian Tkaczyk - Marketing and Product Director
- Nina Wawryszuk - Editor-in-Chief, SEO & Content Marketing
- Ada Renk - Marketing Manager
- Sebastian Hoffman - IT Manager
A word of introduction
The campaign for AuraHerbals.co.uk is a perfect example of the kind of results that cooperation with an SEO agency can lead to if both parties have 100% of trust in each other.
A lot of analysis and strategy considerations, out-of-the-box „plays” and, above all, confidence in the strategy are key to the success of this campaign. Thanks to Adrian and Nina from Aura Herbals, we were able to show what steps we sometimes have to go to in order for the website to grow organically in the Google results.
They were not typical activities, as migrations, sharp cuts and agreeing to remove nearly 200 articles as part of content pruning, rebuilding the site or budgeting for PR SEO activities are difficult decisions for the client.
However, in this campaign they have translated into a reversal of the negative trend, and at the moment to the number 1 position among competitors looking at visibility in AIO.
Kamil Brzozowski
Odyseo co-founder & SEO expert
Objectives of cooperation
Exit of the HCU filter and reversal of the downward trend
Following the Helpful Content Update (HCU), Google's September 2023 algorithm update, we wanted to get out of the downward trend in terms of visibility in Google's organic results.
Rebuilding and developing visibility in TOP3
The main goal was to rebuild pre-downturn visibility and a strong focus on the business aspects of SEO. We worked on category pages, product pages and business support pages.
Increasing organic traffic and attracting new sources of traffic
We started to pay attention to new traffic sources like Discover. The other non-obvious source of traffic we have taken into account is the parasite sub-sites, where we have used PR SEO activities.
Starting situation
Analyses while still at the bid stage led us to the September 2023 HCU (Google Helpful Content Update), when the site began to lose visibility and thus traffic. This was a signal that we needed to focus heavily on analysis in the context of the content within the site and implement additional measures to stop the decline and return to an upward trend.
Main identified issues within the site:
- Decline in visibility and traffic after HCU IX 2023.
- 580 articles on the site, most older than 24 months. Content not siloed and not covering user intent.
- Lack of full integration of the shop in the subdomain with the homepage. Among other things, duplicate product and category subpages. The shop on the main site was a product catalogue redirecting to the subdomain.
- In addition, the popularity of the brand was almost the lowest among competitors, which does not make it easy to generate increases in visibility in such a difficult industry as supplements.
- healthlabs.care - phrase: healthlabs - 49,500 wysz. Months.
- olimpstore.co.uk - phrase: olimp - 40,500 wysz. month.
- aliness.co.uk - phrase: aliness - 18,100 wysz. month.
- allnutrition.co.uk - phrase: allnutrition - 18,100 wysz. month.
- ostrovit.com - phrase: ostrovit - 18,100 wysz. month.
- primabiotic.co.uk - phrase: primabiotic - 14,800 wysz. Months.
- auraherbals.co.uk - phrase: aura herbals - 4,400 wysz. Monthly.
- Natu.Care - Phrase: natu care - 720 wysz. Months
Visibility before HCU of the main site with the shop on the subdomain (22 August 2023)(data from Ahrefs)
3 727
27 August 2023 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP3
11 355
27 August 2023 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP10
25 112
27 August 2023 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP50
Visibility at the start of the cooperation of the main site together with the shop on the subdomain (1 May 2024)(data from Ahrefs)
1 290
1 May 2024 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP3
5 202
1 May 2024 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP10
17 058
1 May 2024 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP50
Project supervisor
Kamil Brzozowski
SEO Expert & Co-founder
- +48 788 913 122
- hello@odyseo.pl
SEO Expert & Co-founder Odyseo. SEO specialist with the industry since 2014. He has gained experience by leading his own projects and also working as SEO Team Leader at agencies Semcore and SAMOSEO.
He has had and continues to have the pleasure of leading SEO projects for many well-known companies such as AuraHerbals.pl, AptekaGemini.pl, Apteka NowaFarmacja.pl, iZielnik.pl, Mydlarnia 4szpaki.pl, CStore.pl, Raszczyk.com.pl.
It focuses on long-term SEO in line with Google guidelines, combining technical optimisation with UX and content development. His goal is to increase conversions and key site events. I develop strategies, perform audits and develop content based on effective content marketing.
Action strategy
Phase I (05.2024 - 08.2024) - foundations and migration
- Migration of the shop from a subdomain to the main domain, combined with the creation of a new graphic design.
- Optimisation of the product category structure and addition of new categories.
- Analysis of the content in the „lexicon” and identification of the main causes of declines.
- Implementation of semantic SEO and content siloing - including themes of collagen, berberine, colloidal silver.
- Direct Answer guidelines - optimising headlines and content for DA in SERPs.
Phase II (09.2024 - present) - trend reversal and development
- Content pruning - we removed approximately 190 articles that did not meet the quality criteria set.
- Migration of the lexicon to the guide section and optimisation of their content in line with current content requirements, as well as meeting user intentions.
- Creation of new content based on ingredient analysis of Aura Herbals products.
- Creative link-building using parasite, i.e. sponsored publications on high authority portals.
- Development of PR-SEO activities and increased budget for links.
- Optimising content for upcoming AI Overviews.
Do you want to set your business on a course for success too?
Let's talk about how to plan a route to stable development together!
Let's talk!
Bartosz Doroz | Team Leader & Business Growth Expert
Description of activities by the project supervisor
STAGE I (05.2024 - 08.2024) - foundations and migration
- Migration of the shop from a subdomain to the main domain, combined with the creation of a new graphic design.
Migration of the shop (08.2024) from the subdomain sklep.auraherbals.co.uk to the main site. Before the shop migration, products were added in the main domain without the possibility to purchase with a redirect to the shop subdomain, where only the product could be purchased.
The aim of the migration was to unify the site and operate only under the main domain. The migration completed with subtle drops in visibility and traffic when considering both the visibility of the shop and the main site together.
There was a lot of keyword phrase overlap between the main domain and the subdomain, and we decided to merge the subdomains through content merge and a 301 redirect map. The articles published on the blog and the shop were very similar, so we didn't expect increases after the content merge. We just wanted to unify the actions so that the algorithm did not have to choose one result or the other within the same domain.
During the migration of the website, we rebuilt the graphic design of the entire website. In particular, we focused on the framework of advice posts, categories and products that are particularly important for SEO. On the blog pages, we focused on providing Google with all the most important information „above the fold”, i.e. as high up on the page as possible. We already had AI Overviews (AIO) in the back of our minds and were planning specific solutions to make the most of its possibilities.
- Optimisation of the product category structure and addition of new categories.
We created many new categories and optimised all of them for key phrases. During the migration, we merged the categories from the subdomain and the main domain.
- Analysis of the content in the „lexicon” and identification of the main causes of declines.
When analysing the site in search of the cause of the drops, we came across the „Lexicon”, which it turned out was the main reason for the drops. This is a guide section that described the ingredients contained in Aura Herbals products. The articles were optimised for the phrases „properties / use”. The content in this section was outdated and often published more than 2 years earlier. They lacked proper semantics, did not cover the intention of the article topic and did not cover user needs.
- Implementation of semantic SEO and content siloing - including topics such as collagen, berberine, colloidal silver or probiotics.
Together with Aura Herbals, we selected a number of key themes for which we applied a silo strategy. We took into account the semantics of the themes and the nesting within the thematic structure. Here, we cannot forget the aforementioned editor-in-chief Nina, who understood our guidelines perfectly and was able to implement them while maintaining a very high level of content. Such partners are hard to find 🕯️.
- Direct Answer guidelines - optimising headlines and content for DA in SERPs.
We prepared guidelines that helped to develop business-relevant blog articles for Direct Answer. We carried out numerous optimisation tests, resulting in optimisation paths that were developed to gain high DA positions.
STAGE II (09.2024 - present) - trend reversal and development
- Content pruning - we removed approximately 190 articles that did not meet the quality criteria set.
During the content pruning, we removed 190 of the 580 articles that were running on the site at the time. These were not siloed to the mainstream theme of the site, so we decided to remove them and leave them with a 404. At the same time, we made sure they were not linked internally in any way so as not to create orphan pages. Hard reset ⏻️
- Migration of the lexicon to the advice section and optimisation of content.
We analysed the composition of all Aura Herbals products. We extracted all the ingredients and verified the potential for key phrases such as „*ingredient* properties”. We cross-referenced the results with all the articles functioning in the lexicon in order to decide which ones could stay and which ones to write from scratch or just robustly develop 🖋️
Example of migrated article “Vitamin A” 4 weeks before and after migration (migration date 4 February):
The article “Artichoke” was migrated on the same day:
- Creation of new content based on ingredient analysis of Aura Herbals products.
We planned the process of migrating valuable articles from the lexicon to the advice section. We wrote all of them taking into account the recommendations we had established. We hoped that Google would quickly forget about the low-quality content spotted by the Helpful Content Update. For this we also used the Ingredient Base we mentioned in the previous section.
- Creative link-building using parasite, i.e. sponsored publications on high authority portals.
- Development of PR-SEO activities and increased budget for links.
During the campaign, we use the parasite technique, which involves publishing high-quality articles on high authority sites. In such a situation, there is a good chance that such an article will gain high positions in search results. Thus, we gained another source of traffic and potential conversions, e.g. the purchase of an article on poradnikzdrowie.pl (article no longer available), where, for example, on 1 December it was visible on the 6th position for the phrase “berberine which is the best” ( 600 wysz. mies.) and was able to break through in a few days and generate quite nice traffic to the site, and below is an example of how it looked in Ahrefs:
The success of parasite SEO convinced our partner to implement an additional budget for the acquisition of PR articles.
- Optimising content for the upcoming AI Overviews, as can be seen, for example, by typing the phrase “berberine opinion of doctors”
During optimisation, we were aware of the upcoming AI Overviews. By optimising existing content, we were able to achieve excellent results. Below is an example that you can see if you type in the phrase “berberine opinion of doctors”
- Guide categories 2in1
Such a category is both a category and an advice post. The main purpose of this is to try to build visibility for general informational words, i.e. our pillar page. Linking from breadcrumbs and the main menu is to further influence the power of this sub-page, which we want to treat as a category according to the logic of building the site structure.
An example of such a category is “Colloidal silver”. At the moment there are not many such categories, but we plan to work on developing this strategy.
Results of actions
Target: Exit the HCU filter and reverse the downward trend
We have reversed the downward trend in TOP 3 and as of 20.05.2025 (date during the creation of the case study for the semKRK competition) the number of phrases was higher than after HCU. We are still a little short of the visibility record. However, we are currently focusing on building visibility in line with the client's business directions.
Below is the data from the Ahrefs tool, where one can see a significant increase in TOP3 (130%) and a slightly more modest but much better-targeted increase in TOP10 (14%). It is worth noting that the graph is characterised by an almost uninterrupted upward trend.
Since January 2025 we have had an upward trend of several months and we recognise that since then the final HCU of September 2023 has „let go” and we have been able to get out of the filter.
Objective: Rebuild and develop visibility in TOP3
SEO campaign launch: 1 May 2024
1 290
1 May 2024 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP3
5 202
1 May 2024 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP10
SEMkrk application date: 26 May 2025
1 669
26 May 2025 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP3
5 460
26 May 2025 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP10
Current status: 30 September 2025
2 580
30 September 2025 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP3
6 540
30 September 2025 (Ahrefs)
Phrases in the TOP10
Objective: „Increasing organic traffic and attracting new sources of traffic”.”
In order not to rely solely on estimates, we also present the increase in organic traffic across the domain.
Organic traffic 01.01-2025 - 30.04.2025 vs. 01.01-2024 - 30.04.2024 - is 60% higher (graphical data prepared during case study creation)
Traffic in the blog section over the same period also shot into space 🚀
By the way, we managed to generate „some” traffic from Google Discover 🔍
Each additional entry from sponsored articles is always an additional value to the client's invested money. which strongly support the website's SEO.
Translating actions into visibility in the AIO
A study we conducted showed that our content strategy translated into the highest visibility in AIOs among our competitors. We are now continuing the upward trend and gaining more and more visibility in AIOs and in LLMs. We have already created action patters that allow our clients to gain more and more high positions, both in AIOs and LLMs.
Customer comments
„The level of commitment and expertise that Kamil Brzozowski and his team have brought to the project has surpassed my previous experience of working with external partners. What sets Kamil apart is his proactivity - he does not wait for tasks, but initiates actions himself, proposes bold, strategic moves and takes responsibility for them.
The results described in this case study, i.e. a full reversal of the negative trend and a dynamic rebuilding of visibility, speak for themselves. Very importantly for us, Kamil was also able to perfectly transfer his knowledge and engage our internal team, creating a true synergy. This is partnership at its best.”
Adrian Tkaczyk
Marketing and Product Director at Aura Herbals
„The best testament to working with Kamil on SEO activities is not only the impressive numbers, growth bars and green colour in Excel, but also my own skills that I have acquired or strengthened with him. My knowledge and understanding of SEO has increased significantly, so that I create even more quality content that not only attracts but also educates clients. I would highly recommend Kamil to work with him - he has a wealth of knowledge and knows how to communicate it perfectly.„
Nina Wawryszuk
Editor-in-Chief
Case study Aura Herbals
Project supervisor
Kamil Brzozowski
SEO Expert & Co-founder
His approach to SEO is always based on compliance with current Google quality guidelines and long-term SEO strategies.
During audits and optimisation, he pays particular attention to UX factors and the development of the site, including through the expansion of the site structure and content marketing activities.
Partnership process
1.
Make an appointment for an interview
Tell us what you need from SEO for your business. Fill in the short form or choose your preferred form of contact. We will get back to you within 24 hours.
2.
Let's talk about your business
Tell us more about your online business. What are your current challenges and plans? We will analyse your area and business goals in detail.
3.
Situation analysis and strategy definition
We will take a close look at your website. Once we have all the necessary information, we will perform the best analysis for your SEO needs.
4.
Transparent SEO action plan
You will receive your completely personalised action plan
with several pricing options. We'll go through it together to show you how an SEO strategy will improve your site's ranking.
Moving together on a growth trajectory?
Let us know what you need and we will prepare an offer within 24 hours. From our side we guarantee:.
Transparency
Measurable results
Effectiveness
Partnership
Write to us! We respond within 24 hours.
Write to us
Call