Google’s Helpful Content Update: What It Means
Google’s mission is to put user experience at the centre of
what they do, and its latest ‘Helpful
Content Update’ is designed to do just this. This sitewide content specific
update rewards sites that are created, “by people and are for people”. The algorithm
assesses whole sites to see if the content is useful for users and not designed
primarily for search engine optimisation. The results of the helpfulness audit
will have a direct impact on a website’s Google ranking.
How Does the Helpful Content Update Work?
Google is using Machine Learner (ML) classifiers to assess
websites. In particular it is looking for what it deems ‘unhelpful’ content, such
as: keyword stuffing and AI produced literature. It also targets content which uses
a scattergun approach to hit trends and zeitgeists, and anything designed to
attract computers not humans.
Any unhelpful content detected will result in a lower SERP
(Search Engine Results Page) ranking. The algorithm is looking to reward human
created content that is geared towards a satisfying experience for your site’s
intended audience. Sites with a clear audience, which share expertise and
experience with a human touch, may well find themselves moving up Google
rankings in the next few months.
What You Need to Do to Your Website
As this is a sitewide signal it is important that the whole
of a website be reviewed. Google has indicated that even some unhelpful content
can affect rankings. It appears that unhelpful content is more damaging than
helpful content is beneficial.
It is important to remove unhelpful content sooner rather
than later, as this could have a significant impact on a site’s performance.
Measuring the overall user experience and how users interact
with sites, will enable firms to assess how useful it is for their intended
audience. Metrics such as CTR, time on page, bounce and exit rates, give an
indication of how a website is providing value for its visitors. We have our
friendly SEO team at Bobble who can
help you with this.
Google has produced a set of questions to audit the
helpfulness of a site’s content:
- 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?
In addition to the above, Google has produced Google’s
Search Quality Rate Guidelines on what it classifies as a good webpage and
a good website.
What is Unhelpful Content?
Unhelpful content is content that is geared towards machines
rather than people. AI generated content is a big part of this as are the old
SEO Black Hat tricks such as, key word stuffing,
invisible text, doorway pages, page swapping, and blog comment spam. Google is
now actively looking to demote sites it detects doing these as they have no
benefit to user experience and are designed solely for search engine
optimisation.
Google warns that answering yes to
even some of the below means a site needs to reconsider its 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?
Timescale
The rollout was complete as of the 9th of
September 2022, meaning that Google is now continuously checking and assessing
sites. The bad news is that if a site is deemed to be unhelpful it can be
several months after the unhelpful content is removed before Google reassesses
it. Businesses reliant on Google rankings should waste no time in auditing and
assessing their sites now.
Contact us
today for more information on optimising your website and see how our team of
experts can help you.
