The HCU research says something uncomfortable:
“It’s not WE who determine whether our topics are on-point or not, it is Google.”
Classification happens to you. You publish, hope, and wait. Google decides what your site is about.
But here’s what the research missed — and it changes everything.
The Research That Changes How We Think About HCU
In April 2024, forensic SEO specialist Carolyn Holzman published groundbreaking research that reframes everything we thought we knew about Google’s Helpful Content System.
The research, titled “Decoding Google’s Helpful Content System: Analyzing Data Supported With Field Observation of the HCS,” wasn’t based on speculation or theory. It was built on years of indexation research, controlled testing, and field data from live business sites.
Her central hypothesis challenges the conventional understanding:
“Google doesn’t only index, rank, and serve individual pages on a site. The Helpful Content System polices a site-wide factor based on the topical nucleus of a site.”
In other words, the Helpful Content System isn’t really about “helpful content” at all—at least not in the way most people think. It’s about topical coherence at the domain level.
This distinction matters enormously. Because if you’ve been trying to recover from HCU by making your content “more helpful” or “more people-first,” you’ve been solving the wrong problem.
What the Research Actually Found
Holzman’s research combines controlled testing with real-world case studies. The findings are striking.
Finding #1: Topical Theming Dramatically Improves Indexation
When Holzman shifted her test sites from random topics to topically themed content, indexation rates improved dramatically:
| Test Condition | Before Theming | After Theming | Improvement |
| Desktop (Simple Keywords) | 63% | 94% | ~50% |
| Desktop (JavaScript) | 68% | 88.8% | ~30% |
| Mobile (Simple Keywords) | 46% | 98% | ~113% |
The content itself didn’t change in quality. What changed was the topical coherence of the site as a whole.
Finding #2: Recovery Requires Fixing the Entire System
One of the most striking case studies involved an indoor hobby site with 400 pages of content. After losing approximately 70% of traffic, the site underwent extensive updates.
Here’s what the team discovered:
“They had to complete significant improvements across ALL 400 problem pages before improvements could be seen. Normally, improvements would have been seen once a page had been reworked.”
Pages fixed in November 2022 didn’t recover until February 2023. Even new pages launched in January 2023 didn’t perform until February 2023—after the majority of site updates were complete.
The old playbook—fix a page, see improvement in 24-48 hours, move to the next—no longer works.
All top pages showed recovery on the same dates, regardless of when individual work was completed. The system had to be coherent before any individual page benefited.
Finding #3: Google Classifies Your Site — Not You
Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding comes from a roofing company case study.
The site was populated with local content pages before the roofing service pages were complete. When Google first indexed the site, local content outnumbered roofing content.
The result? Google classified it as a “city site,” not a roofing site. The roofing service pages were indexed but not served—9 out of 12 service pages were invisible to searchers looking for roofing services.
It took three months after adding nine more roofing-related pages—making roofing “the topic with the most pages”—before the site began generating roofing queries.
Holzman summarizes:
“It’s not WE who determine whether our topics are on-point or not, it is Google.”
Finding #4: No Tool Existed to Measure This
Here’s the admission that stopped me in my tracks:
“There is no software tool that can take HC measurements because at this time on-page tools measure only one page at a time or one page against other domain’s pages that are ranking for the same term.”
The Helpful Content System operates at the site-wide level, evaluating topical coherence across your entire domain. But every existing SEO tool analyzes content page-by-page.
This mismatch means businesses have had no way to see what the HCS classifier actually evaluates.
The Problem with Topical Coherence Alone
Holzman’s research establishes that topical coherence is a critical site-wide factor. But here’s what the research doesn’t address—and where the real opportunity lies.
Topical coherence is about having enough content on a topic for Google to recognize it as your domain’s focus. It’s necessary for passing Google’s classifier.
But having a bunch of posts on the same topic isn’t the same as demonstrating expertise.
Consider the difference:
Topically coherent but disconnected:
- 50 posts about marketing automation
- Each post is good on its own
- No explicit connections between them
- Google sees: “This site writes about marketing automation”
- AI sees: “Surface coverage—I’ll cite them if they have a specific fact I need”
Topically coherent AND semantically connected:
- 50 posts about marketing automation
- Post on segmentation explicitly explains it’s a prerequisite for personalization
- Post on automation explicitly builds on the nurturing framework from an earlier post
- Post on metrics explicitly connects back to the goals established in strategy posts
- Google sees: “This site has comprehensive, structured expertise in marketing automation”
- AI sees: “This is someone who understands marketing automation as a system—I’ll cite them as an authority”
The difference is what I call semantic relationship clarity—the explicit connections between ideas that demonstrate how you think, not just what you write about.
Topical coherence gets you past Google’s gate. Semantic relationship clarity gets you cited as an authority.
The Control Factor: From Guesswork to Architecture
Here’s where this gets actionable.
The research reveals a frustrating reality: Google classifies your site, and you’re at its mercy. Without visibility into what the classifier sees, you’re left guessing.
But that’s only true if you leave your expertise implicit.
When you just publish posts on related topics—without explicitly showing how they connect—you’re gambling. Google sees scattered content. It infers relationships. It classifies you based on patterns it detects.
You’re at its mercy.
But when you make your semantic relationships explicit?
When your post on segmentation explicitly states: “Segmentation is a prerequisite for personalization because you can’t personalize content until you understand who you’re personalizing it for. The research outputs from our [buyer persona methodology] become the decision inputs for strategic content planning…”
When your post on automation explicitly builds: “This workflow design expands on the nurturing framework we established in [previous post], adding the trigger logic that determines when prospects move between stages…”
When your post on metrics explicitly connects: “These KPIs directly measure the strategic goals we outlined in [strategy post], creating accountability for the outcomes that matter…”
Google sees a methodology. A system. A comprehensive expertise.
It classifies you as you intended — because you showed it how your ideas connect.
The Shift in Mindset
This is the fundamental shift:
| Old Approach | New Approach |
| Publish → hope Google infers connections → wait to see what happens | Map your expertise → make relationships explicit → shape your classification |
| React to algorithm changes | Architect your expertise to be understood |
| Hope for the best | Make your methodology visible |
| Classification happens to you | Classification reflects your intent |
You’re not powerless. You just need to stop leaving your expertise invisible.
What This Means Practically
The research validates what we’ve been building with VizzEx.
If the Helpful Content System evaluates topical coherence at the site-wide level, you need tools that can see your content at the site-wide level. Page-by-page analysis isn’t enough.
VizzEx was designed from the ground up to do what Holzman’s research says no tool could do yet—analyze your blog horizontally across all content, not vertically one page at a time.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
See what the classifier likely sees. VizzEx shows you your topic clusters and their relative density—revealing what Google likely thinks your site is about, not what you think it’s about.
Identify disconnected content. VizzEx finds isolated posts and content islands that aren’t contributing to your topical authority—the exact problem the HCU research identifies.
Get specific connection recommendations. Not vague advice to “add more internal links.” VizzEx provides specific semantic linking opportunities with reasoning for why each connection matters—the relationship context AI needs to see.
Make your methodology visible. VizzEx maps the relationships between your posts, revealing where methodology connections are missing and how to build the explicit bridges that demonstrate expertise.
The goal isn’t to game Google’s classifier. It’s to make the expertise you already have visible and mappable—so classification reflects your actual authority, not the algorithm’s best guess.
The Research Behind the Tool
Here’s what makes this moment significant: The research that validates this approach was conducted independently of VizzEx’s development.
Carolyn Holzman spent years building her indexation research project and analyzing live site data. She published her HCU findings in April 2024. I built VizzEx based on my own experience with semantic content analysis and AI discoverability in 2025.
When I reached out to show Carolyn what we’d built, she got excited—because VizzEx was solving exactly the problem her research had identified.
Now we’ve joined forces. Carolyn is a collaborator, advisor, and partner in VizzEx. Her forensic SEO expertise and ongoing research inform how we develop the platform.
This isn’t a case of building research to validate a product. It’s independent research that happened to validate an approach—and the researcher joining the team because the tool fills the gap her work identified.
Taking Control of Your Classification
The research says Google classifies your site — and you’re at its mercy.
But that’s only true if you leave the connections implicit.
When you make your semantic relationships explicit:
- Google sees a methodology, not scattered posts
- AI recognizes comprehensive expertise, not surface coverage
- Classification reflects your intent, not algorithmic inference
From guesswork to architecture.
From hoping to showing.
From scattered content to demonstrated methodology.
Your expertise exists. Now make it visible.
VizzEx is currently in beta. If you’re ready to see your blog the way Google’s classifier sees it—topic clusters, connectivity scores, semantic gaps and all — apply for the VizzEx beta program.
Continue Reading
This article is part of our series on Google’s Helpful Content System, based on Carolyn Holzman’s independent research and its implications for content strategy.
Coming soon in this series:
- Why Your Page-by-Page SEO Recovery Strategy No Longer Works
- Your Site’s Topic Isn’t What You Think It Is: How Google’s HCS Classifier Determines Your Niche
- The Math Behind HCU: How Topic Density Determines What Google Serves
- The Paradigm Shift SEOs Are Missing: Relevance Is Now a Domain Factor
- See What Google’s HCS Classifier Sees—Before It Classifies Your Site
- Google Says Recovery Takes Months. Every Day You Wait Adds to Your Timeline.
Foundational reading:
About the research: “Decoding Google’s Helpful Content System: Analyzing Data Supported With Field Observation of the HCS” was published by Carolyn Holzman through Vertmontly, Inc. in April 2024. Holzman is a forensic SEO specialist who researches how search is evolving and hosts a podcast on her findings. She is now a collaborator and partner at VizzEx.