Google Search is committed to helping people find useful information. That’s why we’re introducing the Helpful Content Guide. This update is part of our ongoing work to show more original, helpful content created by people for people in search results. Here’s what you need to know about the update and what content creators should keep in mind.
Focus on People First Content
The helpful content update is designed to reward content that gives visitors a satisfying experience. Content that doesn’t meet visitors’ expectations may not perform as well.
To help your content perform well with this update, create for people, not just search engines. Focus on creating content that is helpful and satisfying while using SEO best practices to add value. Answering yes to any of these questions means you’re likely taking a people-first approach.
- 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 actually having used a product or service or visited a place).
- Does Your Site Have a Primary Purpose or Focus?
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they have learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone who reads your content leave feeling satisfied?
- Are you keeping our guidance on core updates and product reviews in mind?
Avoid creating content for search engines first.
We recommend following SEO best practices outlined in Google’s SEO Guide. SEO works best when it supports people-first content, while content made mainly for search engines often leaves searchers unsatisfied.
How can you avoid focusing on search engines first? If you answer yes to some or all of the following questions, it may be time to rethink your content strategy:
- Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines rather than made for humans?
- Are you producing lots of content on various topics in the 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 read or heard that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t.)
- Did you decide to enter some niche, uh, 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 a release for a product, movie, or TV show when no release has been committed?
How the Update Works
The update will begin rolling out next week. We’ll update our Google ranking updates page when it starts and when it’s finished, which may take up to two weeks. This update adds a new site-wide signal that we use along with other signals to rank web pages. Our systems automatically look for content that has little value, no added value, or isn’t very helpful to searchers.
Any content on sites with a lot of unhelpful material is less likely to rank well in search, especially if better content is available elsewhere. Removing unhelpful content can improve your pages’ rankings.
You might wonder how long it takes for a site to improve after removing unhelpful content. Sites affected by this update may have the signal applied for several months. Over time, our system runs continuously, checking both new and existing sites. Once it sees that unhelpful content hasn’t come back over time, the classification will be removed. The classification process is entirely automated using a machine learning model. It is not a manual or spam action. Instead, it is just another signal, one of many that Google evaluates to rank content.
People-first content on sites with unhelpful content can still rank well if other signals show it’s helpful and relevant. The signal is weighted. – Sites with more unhelpful content may see a bigger impact. For best results, remove unhelpful content and follow our guidelines.
This update will affect English searches worldwide, and we plan to add support for other languages later. In the coming months, we’ll keep improving how our system detects unhelpful content and will work to better reward people-first content. We appreciate everyone who’s submitted feedback. We received enough reports for this specific update, and the feedback form is now closed. However, for historical accuracy, we left the link in the blog post.
If you have any feedback about this update, you can comment on this thread in our help forum. If you’d like to give us feedback on this update, you can comment in our help forum thread. If your response concerns your own site, use the feedback form for this update. Your input helps our engineers improve our systems.
Source: What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update
