Smile, Google’s provided a helpful content update. Are you grateful? Well, actually you can be.
They’ll be no more finding yourself targeted with unhelpful SEO blogs on an organic search when you need actual proper advice from an expert. We’ll also see far less prolific plagiarising of informative content plastered everywhere simply to drive traffic to superfluous or spurious websites.
So what is Google’s helpful content update and when’s it rolling out?
It’s a big one. The chatter in SEO circles is this may not be described as a core update, but in real terms it’s up there in the rarefied air of the Panda and Penguin core updates.
Simply put, this is an algorithm change for English queries (more languages to follow) which can impact an entire site if the majority of its content is deemed as "unhelpful" based on certain criteria that you can find here: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update.
In summary, content that is deemed not person centric and designed solely for search engines could lead to a website ranking poorly. This targets irrelevant, automated or mostly plagiarised content.
It is believed this update could have started as early as 22nd August, but is expected to be fully rolled out by the start of September.
And what does that mean for us an agency and you as a client?
Basically, it’s not something we didn’t really know already, but now it’s written in Google’s magna carta it can cause ranking fluctuations more than ever before.
For a long time content has been king, but for a number of years now it has had to be informative and useful content on a subject you know about, so that hasn’t changed.
As a digital marketing agency our content marketing strategies have long been driven around providing content that not only is useful to reader, but offers expertise that is not freely available elsewhere.
The update also states that you should not be writing about subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with your business or relevance to the service you provide.
Common sense really, you’d think? Problem is common sense is not all that common.
If you are looking to optimise to improve organic search visibility, then contact our digital team on 01206 765544.