For those of you in the website and digital marketing professions you must have seen Google’s helpful content updates. First rolled out in August 2022, we’ve had three helpful content updates now, the last being in November 2023. These updates typically take up to two weeks to roll out and complete.
What Are Helpful Content Updates?
Google likes to index and rank quality content. It fulfils the needs of people using their search engine. Or at least it should.
When you use Google to find out information, research or buy a product, or even learn something, you expect the results to be relevant and correct. So does Google. If it can’t provide quality search results then users won’t use it.
So the quality content updates reward websites and web pages that are:
- Written primarily for helping people and not just to rank regardless of the quality of the content.
- Created by writers who can demonstrate first-hand experience in the subject matter.
- Demonstrating expertise and enthusiasm.
- Leaving visitors satisfied.
Content that does not achieve these points, and many others, simply aren’t rewarded.
So the helpful content updates are a way of sorting the best pages from the not so good pages.
An Example from 2007
Back in 2007 I was working at a business information website and my strategy was to introduce business news and a business blog. The idea being that our audience of SME decision makers would value our resources more if we added news and blogs to our existing repertoire of in-depth articles and advertorial.
We approached an agency that created news stories from the SME sector every week. They provided us with their news stories. They also supplied some big brand names too so that their own SME offerings had the same news.
That was my first issue – the exact same news at every outlet. I stuck with the plan but raised my concerns very early and clearly demonstrated that the “duplicate content” we were paying for was not reaping any massive organic search benefits. We had a blip in traffic but no more.
I was pushing the news out on our weekly newsletter and on our blog channel, and those were successful, but organic rankings and traffic weren’t great.
And then the agency themselves started publishing the exact same news. They’d shifted position from being a supplier, generating further competition, to also being a competitor. Now the market for their news stories was saturated. This also won them the unfair advantage of being able to publish the news before its paying customers received and published the same news. So, alongside the paying corporates, we were effectively publish duplicate content.
Being an SEO guy, and already optimising the content, my next tactic was to publish first. I took the news stories as soon as I received them and had them published and indexed immediately. I started to see great results.
I was also dissatisfied with the quality of the new content. It was, as we say in SEO, “thin content”. Every news story was 200-300 words and when I read them I was left unfulfilled. When a story mentioned “the latest financial report from RBS” or something similar, all I saw was a couple of hand-picked figures and little else other than maybe a short quote from someone.
What I was doing was manually evaluating the content, just as Google’s Quality Raters do in their much-hallowed 168-page guidelines (16th November 2023). They look at the page quality and sift through the contents to see if the users’ needs are met. In my case as an enthusiastic, hungry for knowledge, commercially-minded professional, my needs were not met. I judged that the content we were pushing was not helpful. And so I made changes.
The Birth of Our Own Helpful Content
With the thin content from the agency, I kept to my publish first tactic. I was also utilising the Google News XML sitemap and managed to get all our content indexed and ranked in the Google News channel. I’d publish content, even if it wasn’t 100% complete, just like the BBC News channel does with its own “Breaking News”.
I’d then race to research and add further helpful information to the thin news content – I’d screengrab the cover of the RBS financial report and display it in my news article, the image added interest. There was a link to the report. So that was useful if a reader wanted to explore further for themselves. I’d read the report and pull out even more useful detail – items that the original authors had overlooked. I’d also add further, fuller quotations from important references, links to external websites, etc.
In a nutshell, by making the content more comprehensive I was making it more useful. As an avid reader of BBC News, I read their own guidelines and applied a huge news corporation’s attitude to that of two people working out of an office in Farnborough. We continued to outrank our competition, and even our supplier because we were truly providing quality, helpful content.
Until 2013
Using the news agency’s content didn’t last long. It was obvious that we were writing far superior content and so we parted ways, probably a year later (2008).
We were soon publishing our own 100% original content, using RSS feeds from government and business organisations, corporates servicing the SME sector, and anything that was for the small and medium-sized business audience.
Some stories didn’t get much traction, others totally flew, and some sat dormant until events attracted visits to our website and sometimes nearly knocked our server over.
We earned a great reputation for SME news, ranking highly, getting traffic, and sharing widely on social media. That continued until 2013 when the business was sold off and I had to go my own way.
But with quality news stories and a complementary SME blog, we did really well in those days back in 2007-2013.
So the moral of the story is that helpful content is nothing new. It’s always been around. It’s just that Google are making an even bigger noise about it than ever, especially when just 2-3 years ago they were having to deal with an enormous 20 billion spam web pages every day!
And what about now? What about the dawn of ChatGPT and the spawning of advice on how to churn out as many articles a day that you have no experience in the subject matter?
As Eric Schmidt said in 2008 I think – the Internet is a cesspool. It’s up to the likes of Google and Bing and the rest of us quality content providers to keep the flag flying. I don’t support mass-produced content purely for the sake of ranking, and I especially don’t appreciate content by people who know nothing about the subject and only “publish” so that they can earn affiliate link money or whichever low-grade get rich scheme is on the hustlers’ radar right now.
End Note
This piece was a bit of a brain dump, to simply highlight the fact that helpful content is not anew concept, it’s just a high profile issue right now and has always been relevant to professional website and digital providers. If anyone is to take anything from this post then I’d say this:
- Familiarise yourself with Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines.
- Understand Google’s helpful content system.
- Read Google’s longstanding advice on building quality content.
- If you’re creating news, see the BBC’s editorial guidelines.
These are not exhaustive, but they’ll get you on the path.
Stay on it.
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