Helpful Content Update 2023: What Does It Mean to You?
By: Dileep Thekkethil | Updated On: January 23, 2024
Table of Contents
Latest Update: September 2023 Helpful Content Update
In September 2023, Google launched another update to its Helpful Content system, touted to significantly improve the classifiers. Unlike previous updates, this new one impacts searches in all languages across the globe.
As Google had suggested earlier, the helpful content updates have a sitewide impact, affecting a website’s visibility across Google Search and Google Discover.
Additionally, Google has added directives for websites that post third-party content, either on their primary site or subdomain. According to the new directive, the updated classifier will consider the helpfulness of content and will have a sitewide impact.
Google recommends that any website experiencing a drop in organic traffic after the update’s rollout should invest time in updating the content to make it more helpful.
Google has once again clarified that it doesn’t object to content written by AI, as long as it proves helpful for users. The updated documentation of the Helpful Content update has edited the section that previously emphasized ranking content “written by people, for people,” replacing it with “helpful content created for people in search results.” This deliberate removal of the mention of content being written by people suggests that AI-written content is not taboo for its helpful content ranking system.
However, Google has advised website owners to ensure the content is created and reviewed by experts, thereby meeting the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) standards, an important aspect of the helpful content ranking system.
Importantly, Google has warned against websites that update the date of published content without adding additional value. This tactic, known for years as a popular SEO strategy used to trick Google algorithms, seems to be addressed by Google to penalize websites employing this lazy strategy.
Despite these advancements, the update didn’t sit well with many SEOs and website owners. They took to social media to complain about low-quality, AI-written content ranking at the top of the search results.
Some even demanded that Google rollback the update, but Google Search Advocate John Mueller categorically denied any chances of the search engine giant rolling back the September 2023 update. However, he did confirm that more updates to the Helpful Content System will follow, which could possibly reverse the effects that websites are currently experiencing.
The September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU) from Google can be aptly described in one word: “aggressive”. With each new iteration of the Helpful Content Update, Google endeavors to move a step closer to fulfilling its mission of ensuring that only the most relevant and high-quality results are showcased atop users’ search queries. However, this journey has left many website owners, who believed they were crafting quality content, feeling disenchanted as they observed their rankings plummet post-update.
Exploring online discussions regarding the impact of the September 2023 HCU reveals a segment of website owners expressing concerns over declining rankings and voicing grievances about lower-quality AI-generated content usurping the top spots.
Despite the outcry, Google remains steadfast in its position. The tech behemoth reiterates that the HCU is designed to promote content that is helpful, reliable, and centered around user needs.
Reports have emerged indicating that some websites have experienced a traffic reduction ranging from 10% to 70%, compelling a number of affected sites to reduce their workforce.
Our analysis of 100 websites, encompassing both past and present clients, has shed light on several key insights:
- Strong Correlation Between Content Helpfulness and User Experience: We discovered that some sites, despite generating helpful content, suffered a dip in rankings post-HCU. A common issue on these sites was the presence of excessive secondary or irrelevant content. Users, when bombarded with auto-playing video ads or popups triggered by text clicks, encountered a degraded user experience. Regardless of content quality, aggressive ad placements rendered the pages unhelpful to users.
- Content Quality and Authenticity: Google has revised its guidelines for crafting helpful content, notably omitting the phrase “created by real humans.” While this suggests an acceptance of AI-generated content, it doesn’t imply that such content will easily secure top rankings. The human touch remains crucial. For instance, a doctor leveraging AI to write a blog should infuse their expertise and years of experience into the content, ensuring it not only adds value but also addresses user queries uniquely.
- Claims vs Facts: Websites, especially in the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categories like health, finance, and law, need to delineate clearly between facts and claims. While health claims can be incorporated, they should be substantiated with evidence and research data. This underpins the importance of the writer’s expertise, as credible claims in such sensitive areas require a proven authority in the respective field.
- Multi-Niche Issue: The Google HCU employs classifiers to evaluate website quality, aligning sites with specific niches within Google’s knowledge graph. This presents a challenge for multi-niche websites (excluding news outlets and publishers) as they must uphold content quality across all niches. Should the classifiers detect subpar content in one niche, it may taint the entire website’s reputation. Hence, it’s pivotal for websites to identify and focus on niches where they possess robust expertise and capabilities.
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Introduction
We know for certain that Google is working round the clock to make the search engine better. This is 100% true because a majority of its revenue is dependent on the user’s happiness with the search results it provides organically.
Google’s Revenue By Segment
Segment | Revenue in Q1 2020 | Revenue in Q1 2021 | YoY Growth % | Revenue share in Q1 2021 |
Google Cloud | $2.77 | $4.05 | 46.20% | 7.32% |
Google Network | $5.22 | $6.80 | 30.26% | 12.29% |
Google Other | $4.43 | $6.49 | 46.50% | 11.73% |
Google Search & Other | $24.50 | $31.88 | 30.11% | 57.64% |
Hedging gains/losses | $0.05 | $-0.11 | -120% | -0.20% |
Other Bets | $0.13 | $0.20 | 53.85% | 0.36% |
YouTube Ads | $4.03 | $6.01 | 49.13% | 10.87% |
Total Revenue | $41.15 | $55.31 | 34.41% | 100.00% |
(Courtesy of businessquant.com. All figures in billions, except percentage)
Think of this: If more users find the Google results not useful, not many will come back, leading to fewer clicks on ads and a smaller amount spent by advertisers with Google.
Additionally, there are other competitors like Bing, Amazon, DuckDuckgo, and recently TikTok that are looking for ways to increase their share of search users. Currently, Google has 91.46% of the search market share and the next immediate competitor Bing is nowhere near that number.
Innovation is something that Google cannot ignore if they want to rule the industry like they do now.
The Helpful Content Updates are just one of the steps the search giant is taking to make the search more user-centric.
One thing that all website owners have to keep in mind is that Google exists not to rank websites but to provide the best result for the users. Most website owners ask SEOs like us why Google favors the competitors and not them.
The truth is Google’s algorithms are mostly non-partisan and all that they care about is the satisfaction of the users who access the information provided.
Looking from a user’s perspective, the Helpful Content Updates are going to help them find the best content on Google, whereas for websites that survived on SEO gimmicks till now, the honeymoon days are over, and it’s time to pull up the socks.
The message is clear: if you don’t have useful information that’s written by subject matter experts to share with the target audience, Google’s Helpful Content Updates are not going to be in your favor.
Additionally, your site’s main purpose and the content you publish should have a high correlation.
That means if you run an insurance website, you cannot rank higher for an article about heart diseases unless your main content is about heart ailments covered under your insurance scheme.
Ask yourself this question: Why should Google rank your content if someone else has published something similar a few months back? If you have a clear answer to this question, don’t be afraid of the Helpful Content Updates.
Definition of Helpful Content Update
What’s the emotion that users have when they leave your website? Are they happy, unhappy or do they think they need to find something more to fulfill their search intent?
If the user had a satisfactory experience with the page, that gives Google a high indication that the content is valuable and it meets the expectation of a user for a particular search query.
On the other hand, if the user leaves the website within a few seconds of landing and continues with the same search, it gives Google enough indication that the content is a misfit for the particular search query.
Websites with a high number of pages that fail to satisfy the search intent of the users are going to see a major setback in Google organic traffic. That’s because Google says a website that publishes a lot of unhelpful content will be classified as low quality by default after being hit by Helpful Content Updates.
However, Google also says, Helpful Content is just one signal in its armory of ranking factors, and if a few pages within a site perform well in all other aspects, it can still rank higher.
Google, for years, has been telling us to create content to satisfy the search intent of the users and not for bots.
Additionally, a lot of impetus will be given to the content producers and their expertise.
For example, a person who writes about technical SEO with no digital footprint of working with any SEO company or authoring similar or related content will find it difficult to rank the article on Google.
Does This Mean SEO is Dead?
We know SEO practices of the 2000s were effectively dead by the early half of 2010 and fast forward to 2024, SEO has metamorphosed into something never before seen by the practitioners of the 2000’s.
What I mean to say is that the Helpful Content Update isn’t going to kill SEO. It’s going to make it even more important.
In the announcement about the new Google update, the search engine giant has categorically stated that in addition to helpful content, a website should also follow SEO standards to get the maximum result.
When a website combines SEO best practices with ideas behind the Helpful Content Update, it opens up new avenues of possibilities and can greatly increase a website’s search engine rankings.
How to Safeguard Your Website from the Impact of Helpful Content Update?
Of course, the Helpful Content Update is going to be a sitewide update, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be as bad as getting a manual action. If you follow a list of actions, your ranking drops can be reversed. Here’s a checklist to help you in case the Helpful Content Update hits you.
1. Don’t Use AI Auto-Generated Content
There are a lot of websites that take advantage of AI content creation tools that auto-generate content. Not only are those contents unhelpful, but they also lack any additional value and are mostly rephrased versions of text that’s already available on the web.
If you have content written by AI tools published, reevaluate them and see if they make sense. Also, make sure to do proper editing.
AI-generated content should provide added value to readers beyond what is already available on the web. Many websites use AI content creation tools to auto-generate content, but often the resulting content lacks value and is simply rephrased versions of existing text.
Additionally, AI auto-generated content about very generic topics are susceptible to content duplication as the same text may show up for any other people as well.
We suggest you delete any auto-AI content and write something afresh that makes sense to the readers by making sure there is enough value addition that makes your content stand apart from the rest that’s already available on the web.
However, if you’re someone who uses AI tools to improve the quality of the content that you authored, that’s perfectly fine. This is because it’s your content primarily, and the ideas are sometimes conveyed better with the help of the AI tool.
Additionally, that content is unique, unlike the auto-generated ones, as they are not available elsewhere on the internet.
If you read the updated search central blog about Google Helpful Content Update, they have replaced the words “written by people, for people” with “helpful content created for people in search results.“
The change in the guideline is important as creators can use AI tools to make the content more useful to the users. If you are someone who uses AI tool with such a purpose, Google’s Helpful Content Update should be in your favor rather than against you.
Also, Google had recently published an AI content guidance document that says, it’s algorithms are not against AI generated content if that content fits into our long-standing approach to show helpful content
2. Write for a Focus Audience
Your website cannot be a jack of all trades, and with the Helpful Content Update, Google is trying to reiterate this even further.
A website that publishes content about Tech, Health, CBD, Finance, and whatnot mainly exists to generate traffic through whatever means. If that isn’t the case, such websites want to monetize by publishing guest posts, which Google strongly condemns.
The new update is going to put an end to the reign of such websites on the top search results. By the way, I don’t think genuine news websites will feel the heat but sites that still use aggregate and rephrased content may find it hard to surface on top of Google.
It’s strongly recommended to stop writing about a topic just because of its potential to drive traffic from search engines.
If you have in-depth knowledge about it and feel like the existing content on the web lacks the valuable information you can provide, go ahead and publish.
On the other hand, when someone indulges in writing for ranking’s sake, the only intention is to hijack another website’s traffic without providing value addition.
This is what Google means when it says, “Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?”
When you write for humans, your content attends to the reader’s fears, doubts, and questions and by the time they leave the site, they are satisfied with the decision to click on your result.
On the flip side, when someone writes to attract people to their site, they end up with the same content already available or deceive the users with clickbait titles and descriptions. Here the intention is just to grab a share of traffic, and user satisfaction isn’t their concern.
When users land on such content, they leave the site feeling they need to search again for the same information. This is something that Google doesn’t want any of their users to go through, and with the Helpful Content Update, the satisfaction of the user will be a huge ranking factor.
3. Unique Ideas Outclass Word Count
There exists this misconception that Google prefers long-form content. Google isn’t looking at the word count but rather the information and value.
Of course, you may see some sites that rank on top with higher word count, but in most cases, these sites provide a lot of value and make navigation easy.
Many websites avoid the main topic and include generic information to ensure the word count is above 1000 or 2000. However, few such sites are getting an undue ranking advantage. But with the Helpful Content Update, these sites can expect a ranking drop.
Additionally, there is a growing trend among ecommerce sites to add generic content to their product and category pages to ensure they get a ranking advantage.
We have come across sites that add 3000 – 4000 words to the category pages so that they get the upper hand in rankings. They do such modifications based on the recommendations provided by AI tools. So it looks like this strategy will backfire after the Helpful Content Update.
Such sites must now focus on adding only relevant content that’s beneficial to the users who are thinking about buying it.
For example, a category page for men’s jeans doesn’t require 1000 words of content about the history of jeans and how to wear jeans. Instead, if the content is about the features offered by the specific brand, and the different styles to choose from, such content adds real value and satisfies the user’s intent.
4. Focus on E.E.A.T
Until now, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness were associated only with YMYL websites. But with the Helpful Content Update, Google might extend the ambit of E.E.A.T to all niches.
According to Google, only a website/person with “real expertise” will be able to provide the value users are looking for.
That means if you are a website owner, ensure that your brand has enough online presence to prove your expertise. Google has been fast moving towards entity recognition through which it can sum up the expertise of a brand in a particular field.
And if you are a blogger, writer or publisher, showcase your expertise in the niche you handle. For example, adding an author bio that briefly describes your expertise would be the easiest way to do this.
For Google, it’s pretty easy to check if the author has the expertise. We know they used to do that back in 2013.
5. Google to Shun Speculative Content
Websites that publish a lot of speculative content might also experience a drop in traffic and rankings after the Helpful Content Update.
The best example that Google gives for such content is sites that suggest release dates of products, movies and TV shows.
In fact, we have come across multiple such websites, and I have personally seen many tech websites speculating about the release date of iPhones, softwares etc.
This is very true with some of the entertainment websites that predict the release date of movies, TV shows and sometimes even actors’ personal lives.
Creating content that promises to answer a question that doesn’t have answers is something that can misguide the users, and with the Helpful Content Update, Google will crack down on such websites.
Recent Discussions Around Helpful Content
About Removing the Content
Marie Haynes asked Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison via X (formerly Twitter), for more details on how websites can recover from being flagged for having “unhelpful content.” She wanted to know if the solution lies in removing parts of web pages, deleting whole pages, or taking off older content that is no longer relevant.
Hi @searchliaison. Google's documentation on the helpful content system talks about recovering by "removing unhelpful content" in order to get the unhelpful content classification removed.
Any chance we could get more clarity on this?
Do you mean:
-remove parts of pages that… pic.twitter.com/wNkQEcfRSa— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) September 1, 2023
Danny responded in a brief manner, saying that website owners should scrutinize their own material to determine if it offers value to their visitors.
People should self-assess their content to understand if they believe it will be helpful to visitors. Keep content on pages or entire pages or whatever they believe is helpful. Get rid of things that aren't, if they're looking critically at them as a visitor.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 1, 2023
At Stan Ventures we recommend clients and website owners who are confused about the helpfulness of the content to follow a three step process.
Self-assessment
Go through your content and decide if it provides value to your audience. If you think it does, keep it. If not, consider revising or removing it.
Third-Party Review
Sometimes it’s hard to evaluate your own work. In such cases, bringing in an outside expert to review your content can provide new perspectives.
Update, Don’t Delete
If you have content that’s slightly off the mark but salvageable, consider improving it instead of deleting it. The appropriateness of this strategy will depend on factors like the nature of your site, the type of content, and its current quality.
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Comments
3 Comments
I was excited when Google announced the helpful content upgrade and published it right away with high hopes. But as time went on, my excitement gave way to the realistic understanding that there was also a lot of PR involved.
I agree with a lot of your points here but let’s nod kid ourselves: word count and domain authority matter. My most popular articles have a high word count with lots of images. People want the full scoop all on one page (think Wikipedia). I think updates are the big takeaway from this update.
Update your site as much as possible. Don’t let things get stale one bit. Daily updates will give you a big edge while everyone else is slacking off and getting lazy.
Very interesting article, I also believe sites that have been auto translated to another language are also more prone now to falling foul of the new update. Looks like Google is in favour of further editing by a human than just relying on a plugin.