{"id":207464,"date":"2023-02-08T16:30:56","date_gmt":"2023-02-08T08:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=207464"},"modified":"2024-10-03T09:24:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T01:24:50","slug":"helpful-content-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/helpful-content-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimizing Your Content for Google’s Helpful Content Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Zero Traffic from Google\u2014that is what more than 50%<\/span><\/a> of online content gets everyday. Ahrefs found this out last 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet, countless websites continue to put them out regularly\u2014a problem made even worse with all the AI-powered content tools out there. The result is an endless flood of low-quality blogs and posts that are, ultimately, not useful for anyone who reads them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, what did Google do in response? They put out another addition to their algorithm, called the \u201cHelpful Content Update.\u201d Their goal with this one was to help make sure that valuable content that actually <\/span>helps<\/span><\/i> their users (a.k.a., people-first content) would be able to rank.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Much like with every update, SEO professionals like you and I need to revisit our strategies to stay ahead of the game. In this article, I will show you some tactics I use to write content\u00a0for people first, while maintaining good SEO practices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What We Know About Google\u2019s Helpful Content Update<\/b><\/h2>\n

The Helpful Content Update algorithm update by Google was designed to improve user experience by putting high-quality content written for people higher up in the SERPs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Google put it in their own words<\/a>:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe system generates a 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Any content\u2014not just unhelpful content\u2014on 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While this update was first announced back in September 2022, it has now progressed into a global update, impacting all languages. Google also announced that the system will continue to publish new signals over the coming months, helping their site identify more content created primarily for search engines versus people.<\/span><\/p>\n

What does this mean for your website? Well, there are a lot of changes that others have documented in the last few months, which I summarize for you here:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n