What Creators Must Know: Google’s Helpful Content Update

Google Search continually evolves to improve the connection between users and helpful information. And Google's commitment to delivering relevant and valuable content is evident in its ongoing updates.

But understanding the nuances of these updates, such as the August 2022 Helpful Content Update, can be challenging for content creators. We go into the details of the August 2022 Helpful Content Update, outlining key considerations for creators seeking to optimize their content for search visibility and user engagement.

Focus on people-first content.

The helpful content update (E-E-A-T Guidelines) aims to reward better content where visitors feel they've had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn't meet a visitor's expectations won't perform as well.

How can you ensure you're creating content that will be successful with our new update? By following Google's long-standing advice and guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines. People-first content creators focus on creating satisfying content while utilizing SEO best practices to bring searchers additional value. Answering yes to the questions below means you're probably on the right track with a people-first approach:

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if it came directly to you?

• Does your content demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise from having used a product or service or visiting a place)?

• Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?

• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?

• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience?

• Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and product reviews?

Avoid creating content for search engines first.

Our advice about having a people-first approach does not invalidate following SEO best practices, such as those covered in Google's own SEO guide. SEO is a helpful activity when it's applied to people-first content. However, content created primarily for search engine traffic strongly correlates with content searchers find unsatisfying.

How do you avoid taking a search engine-first approach? Answering yes to some or all of the questions is a warning sign that you should reevaluate how you're creating content across your site:

• Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines rather than made for humans?

• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some might perform well in search results?

• Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?

• Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?

• Are you writing about things simply because they seem to trend and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience?

• Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?

• Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't).

• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without real expertise, mainly because you thought you'd get search traffic?

• Does your content promise to answer a question that has no answer, such as suggesting a product, movie, or TV show release date when one isn't confirmed?

How the update works.

The update will start rolling out next week. It will post on the Google ranking updates page when it begins and when it is fully rolled out, which could take up to two weeks. This update introduces a new site-wide signal that Google considers among many other signals for ranking web pages. Our systems automatically identify content that seems to have little value, low-added value, or is otherwise not particularly helpful to those doing searches.

Any content — not just unhelpful—on sites with 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. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.

A natural question some will have is how long will it take for a site to do better if it removes unhelpful content? Sites identified by this update may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched and existing sites. The classification will no longer apply as it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long term.

This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model. It is not a manual action nor a spam action. Instead, it's just a new signal and one of many signals Google evaluates to rank content.

This means that some people-first content on sites classified as unhelpful content could still rank well if other signals identify that people-first content is helpful and relevant to a query. The signal is also weighted; sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect. In any case, for the best success, be sure you've removed unhelpful content and are following all our guidelines.

This update impacts English searches globally, to begin with, and Google plans to expand to other languages in the future. Over the coming months, Google will continue to refine how the classifier detects unhelpful content and launch further efforts to reward people-first content better.

You can comment on this thread in our help forum if you have any feedback about this update. If you'd like to give Google feedback specific to your site, you can use the feedback form for this update, which is used to help Google engineers find ways to improve systems overall.