Estimated reading time: 3 minutes.
Background
What is the (Google) helpful content update?
This update is designed to improve the quality of search results by rewarding websites that produce helpful and informative content. The update is focused on identifying and demoting websites that produce content that is primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.
September 2023 Helpful Content System Update
Sept. 14
According to Google, this update featured an “improved classifier.”
- Added new guidance about hosting third-party content and more explanation on what to do after a helpful content system update (perhaps you don’t need to do anything, or perhaps self-assess your content).
- Added new points about removing content or changing dates to the help page on how to create helpful, reliable people-first content.
- Google also removed the words “written by people” and just wrote “helpful content created for people in search results.” Supposedly this is to say AI-generated content is fine when it is helpful.
Rollout is expected to take about two weeks.
Why should you care?
The helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while your content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well, resulting in a negative impact on your search result rankings.
How do the recent Google Core update and HCU update affect my website SEO and SERP rankings?
The impact of these updates on your website’s SEO and SERP rankings can vary depending on your website’s content and how well it matches the intent of the search queries. If you’re producing helpful content, then you don’t need to do anything; in fact, this system may be good for your site, as it is designed to reward helpful content.
Sites identified by this system may find the monitoring signal applied to them over a period of months. The Google classifier runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content hasn’t returned in the long term, the classification will no longer apply.
This means that some people-first content on sites classified as having unhelpful content could still rank well if there are other signals identifying that people-first content as helpful and relevant to a query. The signal is also weighted; sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect. (opinion: though up to now, we rarely see this as being the case…)
If you host third-party content on your main site or in your subdomains, understand that such content may be included in site-wide signals we generate, such as the helpfulness of content. For this reason, if that content is largely independent of the main site’s purpose or produced without close supervision or the involvement of the primary site, we recommend that it should be blocked from being indexed by Google.
Additionally, Core updates can eliminate the otherwise positive impact of a ranking signal targeted by your website, resulting in a drop in search rankings. The HCU update aims to reward better and more useful content, so websites with high-quality content may see an improvement in their search rankings.
In summary, the recent Google Core update and HCU update can have a significant impact on your website’s SEO and SERP rankings. It is important to stay informed about these updates and adjust your SEO content strategy accordingly to adapt to the changes.
