Google confirms helpful content update begin rolling out on August 25 and can take up to two weeks to fully roll out.
Reminder: This Google update content update is site-wide signal.
It targets websites that have an excessively large volume of unsatisfactory or useless material that is written with search engines in mind first.
In other words, did you create that piece of content to aid users or to rank on Google?
Table of Contents
The Official Announcement
Google announced the update’s arrival last week and provided numerous ways to determine if your content meets the criteria for “people-first.”
Google has confirmed the release helpful content update, which devalues content created for search engines and favours content aimed at people on its official search rankings update page.
Quick Facts on Google Helpful Content Update
The key facts that we know about that we know are added below:
Update Name: Google helpful content update
Launch Date: On August 25, it started to roll out.
Rollout Duration: The full rollout will take around two weeks.
Targets: It looks/finds content that was created to rank well in search of help humans/people.
Search Only: This update is currently only impacting Google Search, not Google Discover or other Google surfaces. But Google may expand this to Discover and more in the future.
Penalty: Google made no mention of a penalty, but the update does feel like one to the sites affected by it.
Sitewide: This is a sitewide algorithm, so the whole site will be impacted by this update.
What Should To Do If The Helpful Content Update Impacts Your Site?
Google has provided a list of questions that you can ask yourself about your content.
Read our previous blog where we posted last week to get answers on this question.
Final Notes
Over the next two weeks, Google’s helpful content update will roll out.
It’s advisable to hold off on evaluating the impact until the update is finished.
The change impacts English searches everywhere and will eventually include other languages.
Google will make additional helpful content updates in the future. In its original announcement, Google made it clear that it will keep improving its methods for identifying unhelpful content.
Over the coming months, we will also continue refining how the classifier detects unhelpful content and launch further efforts to better reward people-first content.
