How Google’s Hidden Gems Update Yielded Explosive Growth In Search Visibility For Many Forums

In May of 2023 Google wrote a blog post where it explained it was planning to update its systems to surface “hidden gems”, or content written from a “personal or expert point of view”. We eagerly awaited that update when the ‘fall of insane updates’ arrived including three core updates, a massive helpful content update, a spam update, and a reviews update. Needless to say, it was a crazy time.

Although Google hadn’t confirmed the ‘hidden gems’ update, you could see certain forums exploding in growth. And nothing stood out more than Reddit and Quora. For example, here was their growth during the fall of 2023.

And it wasn’t long before we heard from Google that they did ultimately launch the ‘hidden gems’ update, but just never announced it. Yep, welcome to Google Land. 🙂

So, we found out the update rolled out after the fact, but again, sites with UGC were seeing explosive growth – so it all made sense. We actually don’t know if it rolled out as part of one of the six updates, or separately. But if I had to guess, I would say it was probably part of the October core update. That’s when many forums started to surge like mad. And that’s the point of my post. It wasn’t just Reddit and Quora. Many forums actually benefited greatly from the ‘hidden gems’ update.  

Reddit and Quora Surge Like Mad and the Extreme Focus on Reddit:
As I mentioned above, both Reddit and Quora saw explosive growth with the hidden gems update. Reddit is up 378% since then and Quora is up 332% (based on Semrush data). And they are up 978% and 459%, respectively, based on Sistrix data. Yes, those numbers are correct, and it underscores how an algorithmic change like the “hidden gems” update can impact certain types of sites and rock a SERP.

Much has been said about Reddit’s growth in particular, and for good reason. After Reddit surged in visibility, Google announced a partnership with Reddit paying it as much as $60M per year to use Reddit data to train its AI ******. As part of the agreement, Google gets the firehose of Reddit data (a feed of content versus requiring crawling). That’s a similar setup to what Google has with Twitter by the way. So, that data can be used to help train Google’s AI and can help Google get fast access to all of Reddit’s content.

When you combine the incredible surge in search visibility and the partnership, it has led many to believe that explosive growth in visibility is based on the partnership. You can read more about the partnership via Search Engine Land. And you can read more about Reddit’s increase in visibility in a post written by Silvia Gituto and Lily Ray on the Amsive blog. They cover the categories that surged, subreddits, and more.

Regarding special treatment for Reddit, Google’s Danny Sullivan has explained that’s not the case and that other forums have also benefited from the update. And he’s not wrong about others surging. I have tweeted examples of this since the fall of 2023 showing a number of forums surging since then. I’m tracking about 100 forums across verticals, and many have surged since the fall of 2023. Lily Ray has also been tracking the growth of forums since the fall of 2023 and has shared some of her findings on X.

Now, since they are niche forums, they will obviously NOT see the absolute visibility growth that Reddit or Quora have seen. But percentage-wise, they absolutely surged (and some greatly). I’ll cover the numbers below.

Tracking The Visibility Surges Across Forums Based on the ‘Hidden Gems’ Update:
Based on the surges across forums beginning in the fall of 2023, I wanted to quickly provide some data showing the visibility changes across those sites. So, I ran the visibility numbers of 100 forums comparing those sites year-over-year (August of 2024 compared to August of 2023). When doing that, you can see the massive surges for some sites beyond Reddit and Quora. And percentage-wise, there are some huge surges outside of Reddit and Quora.

First, out of the 97 forums I analyzed, 88% saw increases of over 100% YOY. And many saw increases of 500% or more. And then there were some with over 1000% increases. Note, some forums were located at the domain-level, while others were subdomains or directories.

And just to show you the crazy visibility trending for some, I provided screenshots below from ahrefs. When going through the trending across domains, subdomains, and folders, many started surging with the October 2023 core update and then continued into the fall. Then several spiked in November either with the November 2023 core update or November 2023 reviews update. They both were rolling out at the same time. Also, several of the sites I’m tracking have dropped a bit with the volatility we are seeing this summer. They are still up big-time overall, but some have seen dips recently. You’ll see that in some of the screenshots below. I’m wondering if that’s a sign of things to come for forums with the next core update. It’s possible Google is correcting some of those surges… Time will tell.

Summary: Forums Boom, And That’s Beyond Reddit and Quora.
As you can see, the ‘hidden gems’ update Google rolled out in the fall of 2023 to surface content written from a personal point of view caused many forums to surge visibility-wise. Sure, Reddit and Quora surged like crazy, but they weren’t the only ones seeing explosive growth. Moving forward, the next core update is right around the corner, and time will tell if we see changes that impact forums (maybe adjusting some of the growth there). I’ll be sure to cover what I’m seeing on X, here on my blog, and via my podcast ‘SEO From The Front Lines‘. Until then, keep an eye on forums in the SERPs. Stay tuned.

GG