What is Google’s Helpful Content Update and Why It Is Important?

Google updates are always a matter of concern for digital marketers across the world. The recent announcement about the helpful content update led to several speculations in the past few weeks. However, since the rollout is approaching, the picture has become clearer.

As the name suggests, the update will devalue websites writing content for the search engines, affecting their rankings significantly. The idea behind the update is to help users find relevant and informative content quickly rather than wasting their time and effort on unrelated and inept information.

Valuable content must be a priority in the digital domain because more and more people are searching for information online. Google has taken cognisance of the matter and has created the update to move those sites up on the results page that offer helpful content. It will allow people to find worthy and beneficial content quickly and effortlessly. So, let us understand this update in detail to realise its significance.

What Will the Google Helpful Content Update Do?

According to the tech giant, the algorithm update is part of a wider effort by the company to make search results helpful for users looking for useful information. During their in-house research, Google came across a lot of content created to get higher rankings on the search engine rather than answering the visitors’ queries.

Thus, the update will make sure that high-quality content created by people for other people will get priority on the search results page. Since its a site-wide algorithm, it will eliminate those sites from the results pages that are merely writing content to get rankings and causing disappointment among information seekers. SEO experts in Gold Coast have confirmed that it is not a core update and will apply to English content only and be extended to other languages later.

The update will analyse the content quality. It will be removed from the ranking results if it is lower than other sites. For example, if two sites are uploading articles on the same topic. The one that offers reliable and educational content will be ranked higher, while the other will not get weightage.

Which Sites Will Be Impacted the Most?

Google has been emphasising the creation of suitable, interesting, fact-based, and well-researched content for the longest time, and this update is an effort to meet the same goal. The search engine giant has indicated that sites related to shopping, technology, educational content, and entertainment may experience a significant impact of the update because they often combine information from other sources and present it.

Although the update does not specifically target any domain, it is expected to weed out low-quality content often found on these sites. The stress is on providing original content with a fresh perspective rather than combining information picked from various sites. Thus, writers and creators will have to work on creating people-first content instead of creating search engine-first content. Also, they must steer clear of SEO myths and work on the facts to rank higher.

The Google classifiers will continuously monitor all sites with the help of machine learning to assign rankings to sites. If a website is removed from the ranking after the update is rolled out, it can redeem itself in the long run. However, the content creators must ensure that they do not upload unhelpful content.

Another thing to consider is that sites with an enormous amount of useless content will get noticed faster by Google through the automated procedure. On the contrary, sites with only a few scattered pieces of irrelevant content may not be affected. However, their ranking will depend on the quality of their other relevant content.

How to Avoid Getting Impacted by the Update?

Creating helpful content that will be valuable to people looking for information is the way forward. To execute the task flawlessly, marketers must use the best practices suggested by SEO experts in Gold Coast and the guidelines provided by Google. Creators must focus on understanding the needs of their target audience and develop content that is meaningful.

Also, they should create the content themselves instead of rewriting what they read on other sites. For example, suppose an article is about a new technological innovation. In that case, it must be presented after gathering all the data from reliable sources and subject matter experts to create an insightful and original piece. It should be comprehensive and structured effectively to cover all the elements so that the user does not have to refer to other sites for more information.

The information that has become obsolete, such as some old technology no longer in use, must be removed. Use social proof, back links and internal links to gain authoritativeness and transparency. In addition, if you can include product reviews and testimonials from your customers, it can help in adding value to the content.

What To Do with the Unhelpful Content?

Many sites may have irrelevant and unhelpful content that was created in the past to attract website traffic and get higher rankings. However, to make sure that the ghost from the past does not come back to haunt you, it must be removed from the site, or the developers can include a non-index tag to its HTML code to avoid it from getting crawled by the bots.

Another way to reduce the risk of downfall in search engine rankings is to improve the unhelpful content by getting rid of the unfitting and inadequate stuff. Ensure that it answers all the questions of the readers and provides them with excellent quality and knowledgeable information. It must have the required facts and figures to make it trustworthy without worrying about the word count.

The information that has become obsolete, such as some old technology that is no longer in use, must be removed. In addition, if you can include product reviews and testimonials from your customers, it can help in adding value to the content. Use social proof, back links and internal links to gain authoritativeness and transparency.

Conclusion

Google’s helpful content update is an extension of its ongoing policy of giving preference to high-quality content. With its rollout, the rankings of several sites will be affected. However, creators can make amends to their content and adopt SEO best practices to salvage their spot on the search results page.