The September That Broke a Thousand Blogs

Written in 2026, looking back at the September 2023 Helpful Content Update, and yes, at getting hit by it myself.

Google rolled out the September 2023 Helpful Content Update in the middle of the month, and by the end of it a very large number of blogs, forums and content sites had lost most of their traffic. I know, because one of the sites I run was among them. Digitiz, a French site I’ve built and looked after, went from somewhere around 110,000 visitors a month to about 23,000. That is not a dip. That is roughly four in five of the people just gone.

Most SEOs will never write a sentence like the one above about their own work. I’ve decided to, and I want to explain why, because the reasoning matters more than the wound.

What it felt like to be on the wrong side of it

I’ve written elsewhere about watching traffic die, calmly, from a distance. This was not that. This was mine. I’d built that site, I knew its pages, I’d been proud of some of them. Watching the chart come down through late September, refreshing it the way you poke a bruise, was a genuinely bad week. There’s a specific flavour of professional dread in being the person who’s supposed to understand this stuff and getting hit by it anyway.

So I could have done what a lot of people did. Stayed quiet. Talked only about the accounts that held up. Folded the loss into a vaguer story about a tough algorithm year. Nobody would have known, the numbers on a private site aren’t public unless you make them public.

I made mine public, in my portfolio, on purpose, and I’ve never regretted it.

Why the honesty, specifically

Two reasons, one about the industry and one about me.

The industry reason: this field is full of people who only ever show the line going up. Every case study is a win, every screenshot is a recovery, every year is their best year. It’s not believable, and the people worth working with know it isn’t. When everyone’s undefeated, a person who says here is the one that beat me, and here is exactly how badly, is suddenly the only one in the room you can actually calibrate against. The insiders I respect trust a disclosed loss far more than an undisclosed win. So the 110k to 23k number, the thing I could most easily have hidden, is probably the single most credible line in my whole record.

The me reason is simpler. I couldn’t write anything honest about the update while pretending it hadn’t touched me. Half my job the following year was advising clients through exactly this, and getting hit made me a better advisor at it. It’s hard to earn that lesson any cheaper.

What the update was actually right about

Here’s the part that stings and matters: it wasn’t entirely wrong about the site.

Digitiz had grown, like a lot of successful content sites, partly by covering things broadly and well and partly by filling in pages that existed mostly to rank. That second kind of page had always felt a little hollow to make, and I’d made them anyway because they worked. The update went looking for exactly that hollowness and found it. I don’t think the whole judgement was fair, I lost genuinely good pages alongside the thin ones, but the direction of the judgement was not wrong. A chunk of what the industry called good content, mine included, was thinner than we let ourselves admit.

So the lesson I took, and still hold in 2026, is the one I’d been slow to fully believe: the pages worth having are the ones only you could have written, from something you actually did or know. Everything I’ve built since that September has been an argument with the version of me that made the hollow pages. Losing four out of five visitors is an expensive way to win an argument with yourself. It did win it, though.