Google’s Helpful Content Update and it’s Impact on SEO

Google is the largest search engine on the planet. It is where most people turn to first when they are looking for information, a product, or service. In fact, for many it’s hard to even remember a time when you didn’t have to “Google it” to figure something out. However, you’ve probably also noticed that Google searches often don’t show you the ideal search results first.

This is because of the proliferation of large-scale ad buyers with huge budgets who create uber-optimized SEO content that spams the search results with mediocre content at scale. This content describes the same junk over and over just to please the search engine. This has become very unsatisfying for searchers when it comes to their user experience and readability.

It goes without saying that you need to optimize your content. However, there’s a difference between optimized and over-optimized. And now, with the rise of AI writing tools, it has become even easier to do this. Google knows this and has introduced Google’s Helpful Content Update to try and expand and diversify your search results.

What is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Google’s helpful content update looks to narrow down content that is written solely for the intention of ranking in search engines and doesn’t inform or help searchers. In their announcement, Google said: “Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we’re launching what we’re calling the helpful content update that’s part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”

Google’s Helpful Content update aims to challenge content that seems to have been principally written for ranking well in search engines. The update is designed to make sure that unoriginal, poor-quality content doesn’t rank high in search results. So, if you are writing content with the purpose of driving search engine visibility and traffic, you might be impacted by this.

This update is a site-wide algorithm change. This means that if the machine learning algorithm determines that a disproportionately large amount of your content is unsatisfying or unhelpful, it could lead to your site being flagged – and your whole site will be impacted.

As stated above, Google’s Helpful Content update is part of a larger project whose goal is getting more diversity in search results. Google’s Danny Sullivan said, “Our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.”

Google seeks to reward content that gives readers a satisfying experience and demote content written only to please search engines. For this, they will not only look at the quality of an individual piece of content on your site to establish its value, but also at what you do on the rest of your site.

“This update introduces a new site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals for ranking web pages. Our systems automatically identify content that seems to have little value, low-added value, or is otherwise not particularly helpful to those doing searches,” Google says.

So, what can you do to stay in the good graces of Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Focus on People-First Content

How can you make sure the content you’re creating will be effective with this new update? A good place to start is by reviewing Google’s own advice and guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines.

People-first content focuses on creating satisfying content primarily, while also employing SEO best practices to bring searchers additional value. Google shared a helpful list of questions to help you employ a people-first approach to content creation:

Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?

How to Avoid Creating Search Engine-First Content

What can you do to upgrade your content or decide on what content to delete from your website? Google’s advice about having a people-first approach does not overturn following SEO best practices. Nonetheless, content created principally for search engine traffic is strongly connected with content that searchers find unsatisfying.

Google has provided a useful list of questions to ask yourself when looking at your site’s content. If you answer yes to any of these questions then you should strongly consider updating your site’s content.

Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?

When is This Happening?

The answer is now. Google began rolling out the Helpful Content Update on August 25^th. The first update affects English searches globally and will proliferate to other languages in the near future. Over the coming months, Google will continue refining how the classifier detects unhelpful content and launch further efforts to better reward people-first content.

Moving forward, any content on sites Google determines to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.

A natural question to ask is, how long after removing unhelpful content will it take for an updated site to do better in search rankings? Sites identified by this update may find it applied to them over a period of months. Google’s classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly launched sites as well as existing sites. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned for the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.