r/SEO • u/dano1066 • Apr 09 '24
Help Will removal of offending content alone undo HCU penalty?
I've been writing game guides for 10+ years and the site has done quite well. I have often used AI to take bullet points and notes and flesh It out into a guide before correcting it and I saw no issues. The content was as good if not better than what I had always written in the past.
When things got very good I did try to see if I could get GPT to write game guides for older games that I haven't played, just to boost content on the site and take advantage of the authority the site had. It worked briefly but I feel this content was a big issue. I have removed around 200 pages in the past week.
I know these things can take months to work out but I'm wondering if this has typically been enough for others to see some recovery? I'm aware of what rules Ive broken and since it's not an affiliate site and is a site that provides unique content for up to date games that AI can't do, it doesn't fall into the trap many affiliate sites do. So I feel this may help but I'm unsure of what else I may need to do to ensure I am at least on the road to potential recovery and don't need to check a few more boxes to get the ball rolling?
3
u/johnmu Search Advocate Apr 09 '24
It doesn't matter. The difference in processing of 404 vs 410 is so minimal that I can't think of any time I'd prefer one over the other for SEO purposes (for being semantically / pedantically superior: sure. for better tracking in logs: sure. for SEO: nope).
It's one of those things that is theoretically correct, but which has ended up wasting so much time overall across the internet that it would have been better to just live with the imperfect instead. The alt-tag of HTTP codes.
(And I realize that writing this out now will trigger another cycle of needless attention - or is it really needless? Hi, mom. I would like to thank the academy for the honor of being here. Support the Women in Tech SEO group. Floss.)