Google's New Helpful Content Update

Yesterday Google announced their new Helpful Content update which will roll out next week. If your business uses content to attract customers you should familiarise yourself with this update as you may need to make changes to your approach.

Google wants to ensure its users find content which meets their needs, in this case helpful information. They don’t want users to land on content which appears helpful but lacks substance and has only been created to get the click.

In their announcement Google says that the update is designed to:

“Tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”

The key word (but not ‘keyword’) in the quote above is “seems”. Google does not have the ability to understand the intent of someone creating content, but they can tell when content lacks substance. They can also tell when a site uses practices which result in crappy content.

Content which is light on detail, summarises content from elsewhere without adding value, or is created using automation may be impacted. There’s a full checklist of what to avoid here.

Some of the examples in Google’s announcement post, and their Search Central post, which goes into more detail, lead us to believe this update may have a larger impact on sites focused on creating content as their main activity. For example, the question “Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise?” may relate more to sites creating content about a wide range of topics, rather than a blog focused on a specific area.

Wil Reynolds predicts that sites which focus on a wide range of topics, like CNET or Forbes could be impacted.

Interestingly the update will impact on the entire performance of a site, and not just on a page-by-page basis:

“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined 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”

The implication here is that you could see overall rankings drop if your site features unhelpful content, rather than just seeing the content itself fail to rank well. The process using Machine Learning and the signal is weighted, so sites with lots of “unhelpful” content may be impacted more than those with a little.

The fact that Google has explicitly called out content created “for search engines” means that someone, somewhere will be writing up a post declaring that “SEO is dead”, as has happened about once a year since I’ve been doing SEO. As usual, this update is much more likely to impact those doing bad SEO - good SEOs have been creating people centric content which adds value for years.

If you feel that some of your content might not be helpful, or if you aren’t familiar with all the historical content on your site, now would be a great time to do a content audit. Review your content and see if you think Google would consider it to have been created with a people-first approach. Metrics like time on page and bounce rate can be used to give you an indication of whether content is meeting a user's needs or not.

This is also a great time to be reviewing your content plan, to see if you are happy that the content you will create can add real value to users. If not, it's time to rethink!