Google has recently made a lot of noise by announcing its new update called the Helpful Content algorithm because it is likely that the factors it considers for ranking will change future SEO strategies.
Now that Google’s priority is the usefulness of information for users and their satisfaction, it is better to leave the creation of low-quality and non-original Content according to the principles necessary for search engine ranking. Getting more information about the effects and how the Helpful Content algorithm works will help you put better and more fundamental strategies into your agenda:
What is the Helpful Content algorithm?
Google announced its Helpful Content algorithm on August 18, 2022, and as the name suggests, Google targets Content that is not useful for users.
This algorithm seeks to remove Content written only to rank in the search engine and performs poorly in helping and informing users. The user sees the same Content with enthusiasm and taste in the first place, and after clicking on it, he realizes that it has non-useful Content and is disappointed with his choice. The IThesetypes of pages is only designed to rank well.
According to Google: The Helpful Content algorithm helps ensure that no unoriginal and low-quality content is ranked higher. So if your goal of putting Content on the site is to increase traffic and traffic from search engines, you will most likely be hit by this issue.
Unlike product reviews, which only target specific pages of the site, this algorithm examines the entire site’s Content. It has the potential to affect the SEO performance of all pages.
The only thing you need to remember about the Helpful Content algorithm is that the priority is the satisfaction of the users, so in the first place, the Content of the pages should be written according to the needs and questions of the users.
How the useful content algorithm works
This algorithm examines the Content of the entire site, and the signals sent to the Google search engine through it can affect the ranking of the entire page. In this way, if a site has a lot of unhelpful Content because of the negative signals of the Helpful Content algorithm, the useful Content of the site will also be affected and most likely will not perform well in the ranking.
We are reminded of the famous proverb: “The fire that is strong, dry and wet firewood burn together.”
So if you remove unhelpful Content from your site, you are giving your useful Content a chance to shine. Of course, don’t forget that this algorithm affects English sites initially and will be expanded to other languages in the future.
According to the announcement, what Google wants from you with this update is:
Create great content and use SEO strategies to increase Content that is useful and relevant to the user.
The useful content algorithm derives from E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. E-A-T is the standard Google’s quality evaluators use to evaluate Content, content producers, and websites.
The role of machine learning in the Helpful Content algorithm
This update is not a manual action and works with the help of a machine-learning model. Identification of non-useful Content is made automatically using a classifier.
The helpful Content algorithm uses the weighting technique. That is, some of the site’s Content may be categorized as useless Content, but its useful Content will not suffer performance loss. So, the negative impact of the Helpful Content algorithm is determined by the weight that is determined based on the amount of unhelpful Content on the site. So, the more unhelpful Content is on the site, the stronger and more severe the negative impact of this algorithm.
Of course, the classifier of this algorithm has just started its work. It needs efforts and improvements to better detect non-useful Content and weigh them by performing the necessary optimizations.
How can we create Content that keeps the site from the negative impact of the useful content algorithm?
Like all its algorithms, Google has presented questions that, by thinking and answering them, you can have a clearer path to create useful and satisfying Content and, as a result, receive rewards from Google:
- Does the Content of your site have a specific audience?
- Does the Content of your site have in-depth and specialized information?
- Are the goal and specialized area of your site clear?
- Is your Content in such a way that a person, after reading it, will get the necessary information and reach his goal?
- Is the Content of your site able to encourage and satisfy the user?
- Is your Content in a way that helps the user to get the information, product, or service they want in the first place?
- Are you covering a lot of Content on different topics on your site, hoping that some of them will perform well in search engine rankings?
- Is your Content written by humans, or are you aiming for a lot of machine-generated Content?
The following questions can also be among the criteria of the Helpful Content algorithm:
- Is your Content a summary of the Content of other sites, or do you add new and special Content to them?
- When choosing a topic, do you consider being a trend, or do you write appropriate Content for your potential and regular audience?
- Is the Content of your site comprehensive and complete for users?
- Do you determine the length of your Content according to SEO standards?
- Is your website about your area of expertise, or are you on it because of the high traffic?
- Does your site’s Content answer questions that really don’t have answers?
More Google tips for building useful and quality websites that prioritize users:
- Does a professional and skilled writer write the site content, or are they more superficial?
- Do the articles and other descriptions have spelling, grammar, etc. mistakes?
- Do you use real reports, charts, research, and analysis in your articles when necessary?
- Are the articles well-edited or poorly written to be published sooner?
- Are users dissatisfied with the Content of the site and complain?
According to these questions, we realize that we are facing two important principles:
1) Write Content with the aim of satisfying users.
2) Avoid creating Content to meet the demands of search engines.
What should we do if the Helpful Content algorithm affects the performance of the site’s Content?
The following sites are expected to be hit more by the Helpful Content algorithm than others:
- Sites that focus on broad topics.
- Sites set up with the sole purpose of increasing traffic and making money do not care about providing valuable and specific Content.
According to Google’s advice, the best thing you can do to eliminate this negative impact is to remove unhelpful Content from your site.
So, your first task is to identify pages with poor content, low quality, and full of unnecessary repetition of keywords and then remove them from your site.
The negative impact of the Helpful Content algorithm can last for several months. According to the Content presented in the Google blog post, the classifiers of this algorithm are continuously executed so that the monitoring of existing and new websites is not postponed. Still, the investigations show that if the classifier realizes that the Content of the site is not useful After a few months, they haven’t returned to the site again, ignoring the negative signal about it.
Don’t forget that implementing SEO strategies and providing useful Content complement each other and have their own signals. So don’t ignore the importance of other algorithms and draw a path that satisfies important ranking algorithms like Panda, the priority with the mobile version, and Penguin.
If you attach great importance to the user’s satisfaction with the pages of your site, you should also think about the loading speed of the pages so that the slowness of the page does not cause the user to give up and deprive him of useful Content. Using a virtual server is one of the great ideas to increase the site’s speed, and the reason for this is its high hardware and processing power can meet your needs and prevent the site’s performance from dropping (especially when there is a lot of traffic).
A summary of important information about Google’s Helpful Content algorithm
- The launch date of this algorithm has not been announced yet, but it will probably be on August 22-29.
- The purpose of Google’s Helpful Content algorithm is to improve the ranking and performance of sites that prioritize providing Content to satisfy the user, not the search engine.
- The Helpful Content algorithm will only affect the Google search section at the beginning of the launch, but it is possible to add it to Google Discover and other sections later.
- The Helpful Content algorithm affects the entire site, not the unhelpful pages.
- At the beginning of the launch period, only English sites will be affected by this algorithm, but later it will be developed in other languages.
- This algorithm mostly affects sites with online education topics, entertainment, shopping, and technology-related content because these topics are mostly written for search engines.
Conclusion
Google’s Helpful Content algorithm was developed to remove unhelpful Content and improve the rank of useful Content. In this algorithm, the user is more important than the search engine, and if you increase the satisfaction level of your audience by creating useful Content for the user, you will get your reward from this algorithm. It is enough to pay attention to the completeness, usefulness, and attractiveness of your Content and other important SEO strategies, so as not to be affected by the Helpful Content algorithm.
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