What is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Google keeps on improving its algorithm for keeping the quality of its search results high and most relevant to the user’s intent.

Google is a search engine used by billions of people around the globe and connects people to helpful and insightful information.

To maintain the search result relevance and accuracy, Google keeps updating its algorithm many times a year. This change affects the search result and ultimately, your website’s traffic.

As a webmaster, your first job is to keep track of the Google Algorithm updates and update your website as per the guidelines offered by the Google update.

Recently, Google released an algorithm update that focuses on the content of the website. The update is named Google’s Helpful Content Update.

Google always recommends that you should always create content for your audience and not for the search engine and often many webmasters focuses a lot on the search bots which creates a void for the users.

Now, with this update, Google will penalize these types of websites and appreciate other website rankings which would automatically push your website down.

You can avoid this, by focusing your attention on creating valuable content for your user. In this article, we will find out what is Google’s Helpful Content update, how the update works, and what you should do to avoid penalization.

What is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

While creating content, you’ll have to ask the following questions which will provide you with an answer to whether you are on the right track or not-

Do you have expertise in the field on which your website is based?

Ideal Answer: Yes

After consuming the content, does a visitor feel they’ve learned enough about the topic, or do they simply leave your website to another’s website?

Ideal Answer: They‘re satisfied

Whether your content is for Google bots or users?

Ideal Answer: It’s for Users

Do you use AI automation for creating content or do you have a human touch in your content?

Ideal Answer: No, I produce my own content.

Does your content add value to a user’s life?

Ideal Answer: Yes

Are you creating content on random topics in the hope of some traffic?

Ideal Answer: No, I have a niche website.

Does your content answer the wrong answer or provide an answer to a question which do not have any answer?

Ideal Answer: No.

How does Google’s Helpful Content Update Work?

Google’s Helpful Content Update works by distinguishing between the content that is of high quality and solves the problem of the users and the content of low value.

Google will then rank the content higher in the search engine and decrease the low-value unhelpful content lower in the ranking.

This algorithm update is an automated algo update and is not spam or manual action taken by Google, therefore, if you removed unhelpful content from your website then the chances of getting higher in the searches again will help you in ranking your website higher.

How to Improve website hit with Google’s Helpful Content Update?

You can recover your website which is hit with Google’s Helpful Content Update by removing the content which is of low quality, unhelpful, or re-writing the content from scratch.

For this, you’ll have to audit your website’s content and come up with a content strategy to safeguard yourself from this.

The best way to diagnose your website content is to look at the analytics data of your website. The primary indicators of low-quality content are the bounce rate and average time spent by a user on your website.

The bounce rate will show you how well the engagement of your website is and the average time spent on your website will tell you how well the article is written.

People tend to scan through website content and when they find what they want, they immediately leave the website. But, let’s say they do not find what they want then the user tends to press the back button and visit the next search result.

This is a dangerous action that you want to prevent from your user as this will tell Google that your content is not helpful for the user.

With this update, Google basically wants you to be a single-stop destination for all the information a user might need.