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This update is called “helpful content”.
Their name should pretty much tell you everything you need to know about the update.
I’m happy to say that for year we’ve been steering our SEO clients to provide this type of information on their website as part of the audience-first philosophy that we always embrace. So if you’re already working with us on your SEO, you’re in good hands.
Google says that the update is just starting to roll out and will take a couple of weeks. Like always, we expect the search results for everyone to fluctuate up and down for the next month or so. (You can read a bit about my recommendations on watching your analytics traffic here). That’s what we’ve seen with past major updates, and we expect the same this time – so don’t panic if your numbers look different.
From Google:
"This update introduces a new site-wide signal that we consider 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 content — on sites determined to have 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."
Now read the first sentence of that paragraph above to make sure you understand.
If there is other, more helpful content elsewhere, and your website has a lot of low-value content … then ALL of your content may rank lower in search results.
I also expect Google to finetune this update over the course of several months, like they tend to do, so it’s one that we keep an eye on for all of our SEO clients.
The great news is that websites can be edited!
We regularly schedule content on client websites to go through a new SEO process on a set schedule – the exact timing depends upon how much existing content the client already has vs new content we help create – so we are always editing prior content, which naturally helps combat this.
When we come across content in our review that maybe just isn’t as relevant anymore – which happens as your business changes – we can set it to draft status to take it out of the search results while we determine whether to simply remove it from the website or do more work to update it to be more relevant.
You can take this same approach.
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