Major Google content update about to launch: Is your site safe?

Google has announced a new site-wide algorithm update designed to prioritise ‘helpful content’. Our resident SEO expert, Nick Brogden from Earned Media, gives us a breakdown on exactly what this is and how it could hurt or help your business.

What is the Helpful Content update?

The Google helpful content update is a new site-wide signal for downgrading the rankings of web pages that primarily offer low-quality, regurgitated content.

This is what’s called a site-wide update, meaning it has the potential to impact the entire site, not just the page that caused the issue. So, major sites that are just creating sections of their websites strictly for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes could lose ranking across their entire domain.

Google is putting a big focus on what they call ‘people-first content’. What does this mean?  Basically, Google wants to prioritise original and helpful content written by people for people, not just for search engines.

The simple answer is the update is designed to improve Google rankings by better promoting content created by people who have first-hand knowledge – i.e. content from experts that actually provides useful information.

When will the Google Helpful Content update start to impact results?

On August 18, Google put out a release to advise of this pending update.

They did not provide a specific date, only saying: “The update will start rolling out next week”, and once started it will take about two weeks to fully roll out.

Will this affect your business?

Without knowing the specifics of each website it’s impossible to say if it will be positive or negative for individual businesses. However, as the update is looking to reward informative and helpful content, it’s very likely this will be advantageous to small businesses, as your content is much more likely to be of high quality, on topics that relate to your expertise.

This is seemingly designed to penalise larger sites that are releasing large quantities of content that does not provide information to the reader.

It’s widely speculated in the SEO world that this is to combat the rise of AI-generated content, which is currently flooding the web.

Basically, as long as the content on your site is related to your industry and provides value to the readers, then you’re more likely to benefit than lose from this update.

How might the update impact content creation?

I recently published an article that touched on this subject. I’m under the impression that content creators will need to get more stakeholders involved when they create content, such as:

• Content managers: To control the content workflow.
• Graphic designers: To create compelling visuals.
• Editors: To grammar and fact-check content.
• PR team: For creating engaging angles.
• Technical SEOs: For keyword research and content optimisation.
• Link builders: For assisting with coming up with link-worthy content angles.
• Expert writers: Writers who have expertise on a specific subject matter.

This means that the landscape for creating content could dramatically change, meaning businesses and media publishers alike will have to create better content with unique angles and insights.

How to avoid being penalised by this update

Just do what you should be doing already, by staying true to your industry and ensuring you’re creating content that will provide high value to your customer.

For clarification, this update does not mean content produced by SEO experts is negative; actually it’s to the contrary. As long as you’re working with a high-quality provider who is focused on people-first creation, you will be likely to be additionally rewarded by this update.

But, if your strategy is based on what’s commonly referred to as ‘content spinning’ – which is where new content is created based on rewording content that already exists, without adding any additional information – then you will need to rethink this method and ensure you’re adding some level of expert opinion to what is going live on your site.

The Google Helpful Content update will likely be a significant milestone in the history of Google updates. If it does what it says on the box, then it will improve the quality of Google search results and reward the people who are actually creating high quality original content.

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