Helpful Content update

[JonHill]

Hi, sorry if this has been posted (haven't seen it)

Do you have any thoughts on recent clarification about the Helpful Content update from Google's John Mueller?

https://x.com/JohnMu/status/1791823865749856376

Transcript of the pertinent tweets since uploading images is broken?

"Yes, and I imagine for most sites strongly affected, the effects will be site-wide for the time being, and it will take until the next update to see similar strong effects (assuming the new state of the site is significantly better than before)."

"I can't make any promises, but the team working on this is explictly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update. It would be great to show more users the content that folks have worked hard on, and where sites have taken helpfulness to heart."

It appears we have to focus on content quality and helpfulness site-wide. No straggler pages, everything needs to be up to snuff.

Which, yeah, we should be doing that anyway, but if you have a big site and/or a small team... honestly that can be a daunting task.

How do you think this will affect you in the long run?

[universal4]

The HCU started in mid 2022.
https://searchengineland.com/library...content-update
https://developers.google.com/search...content-update

We had a few threads discussing those updates throughout 2022. The main one is here
https://www.gpwa.org/forum/next-hard...te-261729.html
GPWA search strings helpful content or hcu

Also, as was reported in March 2024, the update that started then had more of the helpful content stuff baked into it.
https://www.gpwa.org/forum/massive-g...ng-266754.html

Since this references a 2 year old update (that is also part of recent updates) it makes sense to cross copy it into the most recent update thread.

Rick
Universal4