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Google to Launch “Helpful Content” Algorithm Update

Google search engine keeps on improving their algorithm so that its users always get the best results for their searches. It wants its users to find the exact answers to the questions they ask. Any website that provides the best answer to the users’ questions, including useful and informative content, always gets the preference from Google.

With its new “helpful content” algorithm, Google is planning to devalue websites that create content primarily for search engines and give more preference to websites that create content for human users. The algorithmic update is going to be a site-wide update and is aimed at only English websites, for the time being.

Announcement

Google made the announcement about the helpful content update through a tweet from its Google Search Central Twitter account. In the tweet, Google has specifically mentioned how it is going to show people more content that is created by people, for people and not for search engines’ traffic.

As part of the announcement on the helpful content update, Google also provided advice for content creators to make sure that they are creating informative and useful content for people.

You can read it under the heading What creators should know about Google’s helpful content update.

Focus on your customer needs

If you are a business that focuses on creating content for your users, make sure that you are creating an experience that satisfies the customer’s needs. Create content that adds value to your users. It must be informative content that helps your users to gain value addition in whatever they already know.

While creating such content you can obviously add SEO elements that add more value to your users. However, make sure that you are not focusing entirely on producing a piece of content that satisfies search engines and not your human customers.

Content must be created by humans

Google is also clear on who should be writing the content for a website. It clearly suggests that people must create content. Many businesses make use of artificial intelligence tools to produce content based on their targeted keywords. With this helpful content update Google will promote content created by humans and may devalue content created by AI tools.

The new algorithmic update is completely an automated update based on a machine learning model and not one of manual action.

Expected results

The helpful content update will bring in a new ranking signal to the search algorithm of Google that will come down hard on websites that publish content that are thin and not considered useful or informative by users. It is under the assumption that better content is already available on other websites and hence it doesn’t make sense to rank a website higher if it doesn’t have helpful content.

It also means that, even if a website has many pieces of content that are deemed unhelpful, if it has content that is informative and adds more value to the customer, then they are still likely to get ranked high in search engine result pages.

What if you are affected by the helpful content update?

If your website has pages with thin and uninformative content that doesn’t add value to your users, there is a high chance of your website getting affected by the helpful content update. If that’s the case, Google suggests removing unhelpful content from your website.

In the announcement it is mentioned that the update is going to be long term to make sure that unhelpful content won’t come back in the future. Google has also specified that the new algorithm update will affect new as well as existing websites.

Conclusion

As a business owner you must closely monitor your website to see if it is getting affected by the helpful content update. As is the norm, continue creating content that adds value to your customers and users.

If you want to create useful and helpful content on your website, you can contact me for the SEO content writing service.

Similarly, if you are worried that your website will get affected by the update, do contact me for help in solving the issue with the organic SEO service.