Google’s Helpful Content Update was released in August 2022, and it aims to provide helpful content to readers.
With new changes in Google’s algorithm, the focus is on gaining content that is meaningful and helpful to readers.
Which Websites Are Likely to Be Affected by Google's Helpful Content Update? Share on X
In this blog, we discuss this new update by Google and how it affects websites.
What is it?
Google’s Helpful Content Update is a step forward to its major project, which aims to get increased diversity in search results. As per Google, it will be uncovering more helpful and original content written by people for people.
The tech giant and largely used search engine aims to reward the content that maximizes readers’ experience, while demoting the content that is only used to please the search engine.
For this purpose, Google not only reviews the content that has been updated, but also the rest of the website regarding what it offers to the users regarding content.
The update comes with the introduction of a new site-wide signal that will be used to rank web pages. The systems at Google automatically differentiate between content that has low value and content that has good value for users.
How does the update work?
The update introduces a site-wide signal that is considered, among many other signals, for ranking web pages. The systems at Google itself identify content that has low value and one that is not helpful to those doing searches online.
Any form of unhelpful content and sites having high amounts of unhelpful content are not going to perform well on the search engines, especially when there is some helpful content available for users to read or see.
Sites thus have to remove unhelpful content from their web pages to rank better. This means that creators have to focus on people-first content.
When is it rolling out and when will it take effect?
The update was released on August 25, 2022, and the rollout will take two weeks to complete.
Which websites are likely to take a hit?
The helpful content update is aimed to reward the type of content which provides a satisfying experience to the users or visitors. Content that doesn’t meet with expectations of the visitor will not perform well.
Websites which are not creating content considering how it will be useful to people but rather focus on how it has suitability for the search engine will get affected.
People-first content creators should focus on creating content that is satisfying. They should also make use of SEO best practices to provide additional value to the searchers.
The websites which are likely to take a hit are those who are publishing content related to:
- Online education
- Arts and entertainment
- Shopping
- Technology
If your answer to the following questions is no, your website will take a hit after this new Google update.
- Are you keeping in mind Google’s guidance for product reviews and core updates?
- Will the reader of your content leave with a satisfying experience?
- Post-reading your content, will the visitor feel that they have gained good insights into the topic they came looking for?
- Is there a primary focus and purpose of your content?
- Does your content provide first-hand expertise and depth of knowledge for the visitor?
- Do you have an existing audience that will come directly to your website and find the content useful?
How to recover from the helpful content update?
You can recover from the helpful content update if you follow the right procedure while creating content. It involves getting answers to some questions such as:
- Is the content being produced by you actually made for humans, or is it just there to attract users from search engines?
- Are you publishing loads of content on different topics, hoping that some of it might perform well in search results?
- Is there any use of extensive automation to produce content on various topics?
- Are you only detailing what others have to say without adding value to your own content?
- Are you only following and publishing content around trending topics and not bothered about the content otherwise how it will affect your readers?
- Is your content such that readers feel like searching again for the topic and finding results or answers on other websites for better information?
- Are you writing pieces of content in preferred word count, as you consider? Google prefers some word count? The same is not true.
- Have you gotten into some niche topic area without the actual expertise on the topic, just thinking that it will help you get better search traffic?
- Is your content promising an answer to a question which has no answer?
These questions, you (or a digital marketing agency) need to address when creating content for your website or web pages. The more content is created based on a human perspective and less on how it will perform on search engines will provide you with better results.
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General FAQs
Google has started to roll out the new helpful content update. As a reminder, Google’s helpful content update is a sitewide signal. It targets websites that have a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content is written for search engines first.
If you want to boost your SEO, look no further than updating your old content. This is the perfect way to increase the traffic your website gets from search engines, and it’s guaranteed to make a huge improvement in how well your content ranks.
Keeping the content up to date on your site helps build trust between you and your customers. Most likely, customers rely on your site for useful information on whatever market you are in. Updated information also helps build domain authority.
