Google has announced that it will roll out a new algorithm update next week called useful content updates. It’s designed to elevate content written for people and degrade content written primarily for SEO.
Unlike recent product review updates for specific types of pages, helpful content updates are site-wide. This means it has the potential to have an impact all pages.
The useful content update also introduces a new signal Google will use to rank pages.
While Google is warning about these algorithm changes, a week is not long to prepare. However, one might argue that all websites should be written for humans in the first place.
Here is all the information available now.
Google useful content updates
Google made the following announcement on Twitter today:
“Next week, we’ll be rolling out a ‘helpful content update’ to better ensure people see more original, useful content written by people for people, not primarily for search engine traffic content.”
The tweet links to a blog post with more information, including details on how the site continues to be successful after useful content updates roll out.
What do useful content updates do?
This update introduces a new ranking signal that will negatively impact sites that publish a lot of content but have little or no added value or are not beneficial to searchers.
“Any content—not just useless content—is less likely to perform well in searches on sites determined to have a relatively large amount of useless content, assuming there are other better content to show elsewhere on the web. For this reason, removing useless content may help improve the ranking of other content.”
What should I do if a useful content update affects me?
If helpful content is updated, Google recommends that you remove the useless content from your site.
Google said that sites affected by the update may find the impact lingering for months. Google’s blog post continues:
“The classifier we used for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor both newly launched and existing sites. As it determines that useless content has not been returned for a long time, the classification will no longer apply.”
Additional Notes on Google’s Helpful Content Updates
Finally, here are some final notes on useful content updates:
- Updates are not manual operations. The process is automated using machine learning models.
- Human-centered content can still rank even when posted on a site with a lot of useless content.
- Signals are weighted, meaning some sites are hit harder than others.
- First, only English searches are affected.
resource: Google
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