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Anyone Recover From the HCU After Major Cleanup? 90% Traffic Loss, Big Changes, Still No Movement

So my site got absolutely crushed by the HCU (lost 90%+ of traffic), and I’ve been doing a full-scale cleanup since mid-February.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

  • Removed ~35% of the site (700 pages gone, ~1,000 remaining)
  • Manually reviewed and improved roughly 30–40% of the remaining content (focusing on pages that actually needed it)
  • Switched to a faster, more lightweight theme
  • Removed basically all affiliate links across the site

For context, the site is in the military niche and has a really strong backlink profile, all earned naturally (no outreach, no paid links).

We’ve picked up links from places like:

  • Business Insider
  • Healthline
  • MedicalNewsToday
  • Army.mil / Navy.mil
  • NIH (nofollow)
  • NY Daily News
  • Baltimore Sun
  • Military.com
  • Multiple .edu sites

There are also dozens of additional nofollow links from major publications (Time, VA.gov, GQ, etc.), plus more .gov and .mil links.

The only real issue I can point to is that we were leaning pretty heavily into affiliate content, including some topics completely outside our niche (like health/supplements).

All of that content has now been removed for a couple of months, and we have no plans to bring it back.

Despite all this, there’s been zero recovery in rankings or traffic. If anything, the site has dipped slightly in the last couple of weeks.

I was expecting at least some movement during the latest core update, but so far nothing.

So I guess my questions are:

  • Am I just being impatient here?
  • Has anyone actually recovered from a major HCU hit after doing this level of cleanup?
  • Is there anything obvious I might still be missing?

At this point, it’s pretty frustrating to put in this much time and effort without seeing any results.

Would really appreciate any insight.

submitted by /u/cwilson133212
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