Analyzing Google’s Helpful Content Update

Google just unleashed a new update for search that looks like it will directly affect all of us in the content marketing world. It’s the latest in a long line of Google SEO updates, stretching back to the infamous Panda in 2011, that seek to raise high-quality sites to the top of the search results while pushing low-quality sites down into obscurity.

This time, Google did not use an animal name for its update, instead choosing the less whimsical “Helpful Content Update.” The announcement came in a post on the Google Search Central blog on August 18, 2022, written by Chris Nelson from Google’s Search Quality department.

Google started the rollout on August 25, 2022, and it should take about two weeks to complete. Right now, it’s only affecting searches in English, but Google will be adding other languages at some unspecified time in the future.

What Does Google Mean By “Helpful Content”?

In the blog post, Nelson says that helpful content provides visitors with a “satisfying experience.” What stops visitor experiences from being satisfying? Content that is created “primarily for search engine traffic,” he says.

The post repeatedly hammers home the point that Google wants content that is written for people first and for SEO second, and that it will reward the former in search engine results and penalize the latter. It says that if you are creating content for SEO first, you need to turn that around.

It’s a bit of a paradox. The way to increase your content’s SEO is by not trying to increase SEO. But it makes total sense. Google’s reputation rises and falls on whether it provides searchers what they are looking for. And businesses also will ultimately do better if their content meets visitors’ needs, rather than drawing them in but leaving them unsatisfied.

What is a Satisfying Experience?

When Google says it wants its search results to point viewers to sites where they will have a “satisfying experience,” what does that really mean?

“Satisfaction” is such a subjective term. When Mick Jagger sings about the lack of satisfaction, we know what he means by remembering our own experiences, but how do you translate that into machine language?

Google can’t measure subjective feelings directly. Its complex algorithm that sorts sites on its search engine results pages (SERPs) can only deal with hard numbers. So, the algorithm needs to change subjective experiences into tangible quantities.

Google is notoriously secretive about what signals its algorithms are looking for. But we can guess. And, after the update has been out for a while, people will start trying to reverse engineer it based on any changes they see to their sites’ rankings.

It seems likely that the bounce rate will be an important indicator for the new update. If a visitor selects your site from the search engine results page and then quickly returns to the SERP to select a different site, that’s a pretty good sign that your site did not have what the searcher was looking for, that it was confusing, or that it bored or repelled the visitor for some other reason – in other words, the searcher was unsatisfied with what they found.

In the blog post, Google provides two lists of questions that show what it thinks you should be doing and what you should avoid to rank well under the new update.

How Important is the Helpful Content SEO Update?

Do the recent Google SEO updates even matter? Or will the effect be too weak to have much of an impact on how sites rank now?

The answer appears to be that it does matter – probably a lot. Google likes to be vague about the exact workings of its algorithms, but in an interview with a blogger, it said that the impact of the update would be “meaningful.”

In the announcement post, Google said that the Helpful Content update would be one signal among many, including those from past Google SEO updates. It will not generate manual actions, but will be completely automated and fueled by machine learning.

Be Careful: Unhelpful Pages Might Sink Your Whole Site

In the blog post, Google says that if your site has “relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall,” then all of the content on your site – not just the parts of it that Google has found to be unhelpful – might be pushed down in the search results. Google advises that you remove unhelpful content from your site to improve the search ranking for the rest of your content.

The site-wide penalty is not certain, though. It will depend, at least in part, on how much content you have that Google considers unhelpful. The more you have, the more likely the rest of your site will be penalized. Google may also go easy on the “people first” portions of your site if it detects signals of their helpfulness.

If you are penalized by this update, it could take a while to get back in Google’s good graces. The “unhelpful” signal will continue to apply to your site for months after you have removed the unhelpful content. It’s only after Google has determined that you haven’t put the unhelpful content back “in the long term,” that it will remove the signal.

SEO Best Practices

While Google is emphasizing creating content for “people first,” they are not discrediting SEO entirely. The company says that SEO is a “helpful activity” when applied to good content and recommends following the best practices described in Google’s own SEO guide.

Dos and Don’ts to Comply With Google’s Helpful Content Update

The announcement post provides a long list of dos and don’ts in the form of questions. The overarching theme is to focus on creating content for people first.

Dos include:

• Content that shows deep knowledge and first-hand experience
• Having a primary purpose or focus to your site
• Providing enough information for visitors to achieve their goals

Don’ts include:

• Using “extensive” automation
• Covering many topics, writing on trending topics, or writing in areas without any real expertise just to try to do well in search
• Not adding much value to what others have already written
• Writing to a particular word count because you heard that Google prefers it (Google says it doesn’t!)
• Implying you will answer a question that doesn’t have an answer

All of these guidelines build on previous Google SEO updates and are in addition to them, not replacements. The goal doesn’t seem to be a big departure from anything in the past, but content creators who are using an SEO-first approach and don’t pay attention to the current update could find their sites sliding down the ranks.