Google is now penalising sites for publishing ‘unhelpful’ content. Will your page rankings suffer?

Big news in the SEO world. Google has released a new, site-wide ranking signal that rewards sites that publish satisfying content and penalises those that don’t.

According to Google Search Central Blog, the update — fittingly called the ‘helpful content’ update — begins this week; however, it could take up to two weeks to roll out completely.

Google has laid down the ground rules, stating that content must take a ‘people-first’ approach to achieve or maintain a favourable search ranking. Content that is created to oblige search engines first on the other hand may take a significant hit. In short, Google will delineate between content that’s created to rank over content that’s created to help users.

If you’re engaging in any of the following types of search-pandering content gathering, it’s time to shift gears post haste:

• Relying upon AI generation content tools to ‘automatically’ create content;
• Aggregating information from other sites without creating anything original;
• Delving into topics without authority, consequently prompting users to continue searching for answers elsewhere;
• Creating content based on what’s trending rather than specialist knowledge; and
• Focusing on word count over quality.

Keep your eye on your rankings over the next couple of weeks to gauge if you’ve been impacted. If your rankings take a dive, weed out old and unhelpful content (or better still, beat Google to it and start your spring clean now). Use your analytics as a guide. If you have pages that aren’t getting any traffic or people are landing on those pages and promptly leaving, update or ditch them.

Any content you’re publishing from now on must people-please by providing reasoning, answers, expertise and data points that satisfy their queries.