Albert Jeremia

A "20% recovery" over a year later, is an absolute joke. This is all just PR and optics... The HCU should be renamed the "Higher Centralization Update" because it's part of the grander scheme to solidify control over online content to serve their agenda. Baking it into the algo forces us all into a box, prioritizing Google's own standards of "helpfulness" rather than letting searchers determine value for themselves... It's like Google is positioning itself as the ultimate arbiter, deciding what's "worthy" based on signals it is not just judge, jury and executioner on, but also the dictator that wrote the laws they themselves routinely flaunt. Every update reinforces this centralized power structure, guiding search and user behavior back to larger platforms and away from the underdogs, that ironically, were usually the originators too. I saw this coming FAR before the HCU, and I warned niche site owners in a video that I was ridiculed for at the time - Google were moving more and more towards authority as THE metric, and reshaping the intent of the SERPs away from the type of posts and pages that had become the norm. They were deemed an illegal monopoly, because that is the tactics they use: They see success and steal it, usually with some cleaner UI bolted as a search "feature", but inevitably ends in a worst experience. I've always been transparent about where I am coming from too: If they aren't going to play by the rules, then you can be sure as hell I ain't playing by there rules! Google will lie to you and say they want "unique" voices, but they baked consensus and HCU into the algo because they want uniform. Uniform control, uniform standards, and uniform voices, all sanitized to fit into their idea of "trustworthiness" and "helpfulness", which conveniently aligns with the interests of big brands and mainstream media. Remember, Google’s MO is to "eliminate unpredictability" - When every answer in the SERPs follows their controlled guidelines, they know exactly what users are seeing, clicking, and believing. That’s not to say quality control is inherently bad, but this isn’t about quality, it’s about ownership. By propping up big sites and disfavoring the smaller players, they’re systematically stripping the diversity out of the internet in favor of a stale, corporate tone. In my opinion, it’s all about locking in their share of influence over how we think, learn, and choose. And this goes way beyond SEO.