Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we're launching what we're calling the “helpful content update” that's part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results. Below is more about the update and things creators should consider. Show Focus on people-first contentThe helpful content update aims 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. 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. Answering yes to the questions below means you're probably on the right track with a people-first approach:
Avoid creating content for search engines firstOur 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. How do you avoid taking a search engine-first approach? Answering yes to some or all of the questions is a warning sign that you should reevaluate how you're creating content across your site:
How the update worksThe update will start rolling out next week. We will post on our Google ranking updates page when it begins and when it is fully rolled out, which could take up to two weeks. 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. A natural question some will have is how long will it take for a site to do better, if it removes unhelpful content? Sites identified by this update may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply. This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model. It is not a manual action nor a spam action. Instead, it's just a new signal and one of many signals Google evaluates to rank content. This means that some people-first content on sites classified as having unhelpful content could still rank well, if there are other signals identifying that people-first content as helpful and relevant to a query. The signal is also weighted; sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect. In any case, for the best success, be sure you've removed unhelpful content and also are following all our guidelines. This update impacts English searches globally to begin with and we plan to expand to other languages in the future. 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. If you have any feedback about this update, you can comment on this thread in our help forum. If you'd like to give us feedback specific to your site, you can use the feedback form for this update. We use your feedback to help our engineers find ways to improve our systems overall. Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. [{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "missingTheInformationINeed", "label":"Missing the information I need" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "tooComplicatedTooManySteps", "label":"Too complicated / too many steps" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "outOfDate", "label":"Out of date" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "samplesCodeIssue", "label":"Samples / code issue" },{ "type": "thumb-down", "id": "otherDown", "label":"Other" }] [{ "type": "thumb-up", "id": "easyToUnderstand", "label":"Easy to understand" },{ "type": "thumb-up", "id": "solvedMyProblem", "label":"Solved my problem" },{ "type": "thumb-up", "id": "otherUp", "label":"Other" }] Need to tell us more? |