If you search or browse this forum or just google, you will see that the problem for most people has not been solved, these updates have killed a lot of websites but maybe you can wait a bit for the new google update to roll out, when will it roll out? Nobody knows but it might change somethings, I wouldn't count on it on though, best bet is to diversify your traffic.

There are no reports of recovery that I have seen.

However there are numerous tactics that are likely being worked on by SEO’s which will vary according to the individual circumstances and corresponding analysis’. Danny Sullivan has been quoted as saying recovery is possible.

As yet I haven’t seen any consensus on specific approaches that anyone is prepared to share. No doubt a huge number of folks have given up as it may be too hard or uneconomic. And that’s a shame imo

I hardly see any recovery from these updates (In the Netherlands). My main website was hit bad and even after a lot of 'changes / updates' nothing seems to work. My website ranked very good from 2015 - HCU 2023. Dropped like a brick like my content was not valuable anymore, really strange. A lot of webmaster I have contact with share this problem. It seems that when your domain is 'flagged' you can't recover. I see webmasters redirecting their content to new (or expired) domains.

No, my site was hit, and it has not recovered. Its traffic Is dropping with each random and core update.

No recovery. Every year it all gets worse.

No one recovered. It is just getting worse.

A quality site of mine was not hit by this HCU update, the keyword positions remained steady for most keywords.

HOWEVER traffic dropped significantly primarily due to more ads, PAA and ai answers and traffic is dropping. I wonder how many people assume the HCU affected their site when it is just less viable traffic being sent from search. My sites are not getting updated anymore - it is not economically viable to do so I'm not a charity here to feed AI with my knowledge and expertise, I'd rather deal with real life customers and people.

What has happened to US traffic will happen to other regions and I'm already seeing the traffic drop rolling out region by region.

The sites that were affected generally offered information that an AI could do a reasonable job at creating so probably deserved to get hit. I did go through rewrites, link buying, meta tag changes, de SEO and various methods to compare sites and the only one that saw a slight bump in traffic was one I didn't touch or change, all the others have dropped another 5-10%.

Danny Sullivan has been quoted as saying recovery is possible.

If a recovery was possible, there would be websites that have recovered in the meantime.

I have seen several websites (with very different content and strategies) that have been affected, but none of them have recovered.

One website even had the GoogleBot blocked from all pages except the home page via robots.txt. Even after 6 weeks and hundreds of thousands of blocked pages, there is no recovery. The home page still does not appear in the top position when searching for the domain name - a very clear penalty.

As long as there are no real cases of recovery, it will remain a myth. (And it's deliberately done that way).

I have recovered 2 sites from HCU. Been ok for a few months now. I don't want to post them here for obvious reasons.

I have recovered them in a legitimate way.

Content was all renewed and presented in a more user friendly way.

Concept of sites was also changed from content and ads to e-commerce. It now matches better what Google is ranking in those niches. We are making and selling our own products now.

One of the sites had another significant change but don't want to post it here.

But....it is possible to recover. Just think that things have moved on and just trying to better what you already have is not enough. It needs a different approach.

On my side, no hope.

@lewis1, I have observed the same as you said and we changed the approach, the challenge is our website is very large and not economical to change content across all the effected pages in 2 to 3 months. I need to spend at least 15k USD.

I see that affiliate websites who post genuine reviews and really used + tested products are not recovering. Affiliate websites who change their whole approach into E-commerce keep ranking well. They pretend to be a webshop with product categories, but when you click 'buy' or 'add to cart', you are send to the real webshop with an affiliate link. So basically it pays to lie and pretend to be something you are not ;)

Unfortunately, the new algorithm does not work for spam content at all.

This is frustrating. Google SERP is getting worse. I'm not seeing any recovery from HCU-hit sites.

My daughter's blog which was written by hand, no AI at all, with her own photos got hit by HCU. It didn't even have any ads on! In many cases it's been very unfair but then again, so have most of the major updates