Google’s Helpful Content Update is Finished Rolling Out, Impacts Are Starting to be Noticed

Google has decided that they want the search results to favor websites that tend to be more useful. Yes you read that right, websites not documents. To pull this off they created a brand new search ranking signal and created an algorithm which will score all documents on the web as Helpful or Not Helpful. The idea is that if a website has too much content considered to be “not helpful” it will drag the whole site down in the rankings, similarly to how the Panda update worked to bring an entire site down if it found article marketing content or other signs of a content farm.

The opposite is also true, websites that have a larger number of pages considered to be “helpful” will get a sitewide boost in the rankings.

Google didn’t go in to too much detail about what they found helpful or not helpful though when they made their announcement.

Websites started seeing changes in their traffic volumes between Tuesday the 6th and Friday the 9th.

According to Joe Youngblood, an SEO expert in Dallas, this Helpful Content Update appears to be favoring websites with a blog especially when that blog has useful or “helpful” content included and when there is more blog content than service / product pages on a website.

Read his full thread on early understanding of the update here:

Before the latest Core Update ruins everything let's take a look at the Helpful Content Update and how impacted a few sites.

Yes, it's a thread. But I promise to not be an annoying douche (or at least try).

Green line marks date of HCU starting.

— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) September 12, 2022

Immediately after the Helpful Content Update finished rolling out Google released a new Core Update. This means webmasters / business owners / and SEOs have a small window to understand the impact of the Helpful Content Update on their website.