Google’s summer 2022 ‘Helpful Content Update‘ is one that should benefit most businesses, especially those that ensure that their websites have a decent amount of, er, helpful content.
The idea is to make it harder for pages with disappointing content to rank well in the search results – ones that don’t contain much past an attractive headline and some thinly-researched text. If anyone’s thinking that it’s going to be hard for Google to spot this, they’re seriously underestimating the company’s use of machine intelligence and its mind-bogglingly large amount of data on web use.
Just assume that it’s going to be really, really good at this stuff and act accordingly. Also understand that it’s going to get even better at spotting poor content as time goes on …and it’s the future we should be planning for.
The sort of content the update seeks to penalise is the same stuff that turns off visitors looking for answers: lack of insight, unoriginal writing, no empathy and what’s clearly a focus on search engine ranking. For some companies, this might mean revisiting content that was created in the past to appeal to search engines, and which might even have worked. Don’t forget, if this stuff gets penalised, the problem is more than just that page losing its ranking – the whole site can suffer to a lesser extent.
Once again, I believe the best way to get original, ‘helpful’ content (which should rank even more strongly in the future) is to talk to experts at our own company and transcribe what they say. Real people don’t talk like machines.