Will Google’s Helpful Content Update help your sites?

[MichaelCorfman]

Last Thursday, August 18th, Google made a new blog post in which it announced that it would begin rolling out a new update, referred to as the “Helpful Content Update,” this week, and that the rollout should be completed within two weeks of when it starts. You can read the post here:

What creators should know about Google's helpful content update

The goal of the update is to “better reward 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.”

Google goes on to say “How can you ensure you're creating content that will be successful with our new update? By following our long-standing advice and guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines. People-first content creators focus first on creating satisfying content, while also utilizing SEO best practices to bring searchers additional value.

“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 is strongly correlated with content that searchers find unsatisfying.”

The update introduces a new site-wide signal identifying sites Google considers to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content. All content on a site, good and bad, will be impacted by the new signal. So, sites with unhelpful content will be penalized across the board.

The update will initially impact English searches globally, but will expand to include other languages in the future.

For this week’s poll, I ask if you believe the update will be helpful or harmful for your sites. It sounds like we will find out soon enough.

Michael

[Tromlas]

This update will hit EN language queries and EN websites in the beginning. Not sure how long it will take until it reaches the markets where we are most active (Sweden and a few others). But when it does, we're prepared for it. HQ and helpful content has always been a No1 priority!