On August 18, 2022, Google took to Twitter to announce its latest “helpful content” algorithm update.

Helpful Content Algorithm Update

What’s the update about?
How will it affect your website?
What can you do to avoid negative effects?

Find answers to all the questions right here. 

What is Google’s Helpful Content algorithm update?

Google has always worked to ensure that its end-users – the searchers – get access to good quality and helpful content.

In a bid to further improve the experience for the users, Google’s latest Helpful Content update will – 

  • Boost content that is written for the people
  • Devalue content that is written for just search engine optimization

This means:

  1. Low-quality content, which doesn’t contain much value is only filled with fluff content and only keywords will see a drop in rankings.
  2. Automatically generated content that aims to manipulate search engines will suffer ranking drops.
  3. Helpful content, which is useful for the users will not face any issues.

The new update has also introduced a new “ranking signal” which will be used for ranking pages on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). 

The Helpful Content algorithm update has come after the Panda update and seems to be in line with its goal of rewarding websites with high-quality content.

What sites/web pages will be affected by the Helpful Content update?

Before the Helpful Content update was announced, Google also announced a Product Review update. The latter affected only a certain type of pages, but this update is termed “sitewide”.

This means all websites and web pages are likely to be affected by this update. 

However, if your website/web pages have helpful content written for people and not search engines, the update is unlikely to affect you. 

When will this update come into effect?

According to Google’s tweet, the update will roll out next week, which means you will start seeing the impact from August 22, 2022. 

That means even though Google gave webmasters a heads-up, there isn’t much time for them to take any action. The counterargument for that complaint is that all content on the web should have been written keeping real people in mind in the first place. 

So those who have paid attention to Google’s guidelines for creating content, wouldn’t have to worry much anyway. 

“My website is affected by the Helpful Content update. What can I do?”

If you see that your website is being affected by the Helpful Content update, there’s just one thing that you can do.

And that is to remove the “unhelpful content” from your website.

Wondering how fast will that help you regain rankings? Here’s what Google says in that regard – 

Google Helpful Content Update

Check out Google’s blog on the Helpful Content update here.

So we can say that it might take some time to see the effect, but you can rest assured that if you correct your content, the negative impact will go away.

Here’s what else we know about the update yet. 

  1. The update is automated and no manual action will be taken. 
  2. The update will affect only English language content for now. Though there are plans to extend the update to other languages too. 
  3. The classifier will keep getting updates in the upcoming months and thus, people-first content will likely see more and more boosts, while SEO-first content will be devalued.
  4. Google still recommends using its SEO best practices and guides for creating and publishing content.

The way forward…

That’s all the information we have about Google’s Helpful Content update till now. Stay tuned to learn more about the update and its effects. 

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