Google has started rolling out a new helpful content update that we announced in advance last week.
Note that Google’s helpful content updates are a site-wide signal. Intended for websites with a relatively large amount of frustrating or unhelpful content, where the content is written for search engines first.
In short, was the content written to rank on Google, or was it written to help users?
Presentation. Google said on its August 25th update page: It can take up to two weeks to complete the rollout. ”
The rollout started this morning. Google quietly started rolling out this helpful content update early this morning, sometime before 5am ET. We’ll let you know once this update has finished rolling out.
The update should finish rolling out in 1-2 weeks. You can also check the Search Updates page for updates on when this rollout will end, according to Google.
What to do if you get hit Google provides a list of questions you can ask yourself about your content. Please read these questions posted here and ask yourself in an unbiased manner if the content is in sync with this update.
Keep in mind that if you’ve been affected by this update, it could take months to recover if you’ve done everything right and made changes to your content over time.
More information on useful content updates. According to Google, this new helpful content update is aimed at “content that appears to be primarily created to appear higher in search engines rather than to help or inform people.” This update aims to make it easier for searchers to find “quality content.”
Google wants to help users by rewarding better, more useful content written for humans.
Content created for the purpose of ranking in search engines, perhaps called search engine first content, is becoming more and more talked about on social media and elsewhere. In short, searchers are frustrated landing on webpages that are not useful to them but are designed to appear higher in search.
This algorithm aims to downgrade these types of websites while promoting more helpful websites designed for humans rather than search engines.
Google says this is “an ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier for people to find content in search that they feel is authoritative and useful.” This is intended for content written for search engines rather than human-first content.
why you care. If you notice changes in your Google Search rankings and visibility over the next few days, especially if they are big changes, they could probably be attributed to this update. , hope to recover in the coming months.
We hope you all benefited from this update.
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About the author
Barry Schwartz is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns his RustyBrick, his New York-based web consulting firm. He also runs the Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on highly advanced He SEM topics.You can follow Barry Twitter is here.
