Digital marketing companies are in a frenzy since Google announced the new Helpful Content Update. The SEO industry is about to change once again as the new algorithm sounds like a big deal.
Whether you are a content marketer or SEO strategist, this update will ensure you revamp your content strategy and make it more user friendly instead of SEO friendly. The new update is going to devalue content that is written primarily for SEO. However, websites who provide a satisfying experience to users by providing valuable and original content are going to get rewarded.
Here is everything you need to know about the latest Google Helpful Content Update:
What Google Says About The New Update?
Being the biggest search engine on the planet, it is Google’s responsibility to connect people to helpful content. This algorithm is a part of a broader goal to ensure searchers find more helpful and original content in the search engine results page.
This is what we found interesting in the official Helpful Content Update announcement:
“People see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”
In the last few years, we have seen tremendous growth in artificial intelligence content writing tools. These AI tools are capable of churning out thousands of words in a few minutes. In addition, AI-written content contains semantic keywords and the words Google uses to determine the relevancy of the content with the search term. It is the reason why AI-written content can rank quickly and higher than their competitors.
But is AI-written content better than content written by an actual person? In our honest opinion, AI-written content can never compete with a seasoned writer.
We expect the websites which are filled with AI-written content to experience a major downfall in their traffic. The Helpful content update reminds us of Google's Penguin and Panda algorithms which tanked thousands of websites in various industries.
What Does The Helpful Content Update Do?
The update will negatively impact the websites that publish low-quality, unhelpful, plagiarised or AI-written content.
Here is what Google says:
“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that's better to display. “
How To Recover From The Helpful Content Update?
If your website gets impacted from the new algorithm, you will start noticing a drop in your organic rankings and traffic. The official post does not mention if the site owner’s impacted by the latest update will get a notification in their Google Search Console. However, industry experts believe that the impact would be quite similar to that of a site penalty.
But the good news is that you can remove the low-quality and unhelpful content from your website to get rid of the signal.
Here is what Google says about the issue:
“Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.”
How To Write Helpful Content?
Below are the points that you must consider to write people-first content:
- Do not write for search engines and instead understand the intent of the searcher and do your best to help them.
- Do not use extensive automation to produce content.
- Add value.
- Understand the audience of your post and provide them with valuable and authentic insights.
- Google doesn’t have a preferred word count.
- Write content to share your expertise and not to gain search traffic.
- Answer the query.
Other Details About Google’s Helpful Content Update
Here are our final notes about the new update:
- The update is going to roll out in the third week of August.
- The new algorithm will impact English searches globally and Google plans to expand to other languages in the near future.
- The update works on an automated machine learning model.
