"Helpful Content Update" Wishlist

There's not a chance in hell that I'll achieve much cut-through at a time where every SEO and their dog will be writing some kind of think piece about the upcoming "helpful content update" , but I'm going to give it a shot.

I'm old enough to remember the Panda update. It absolutely decimated the portfolio of websites I was working on at the time as a junior. We all got made redundant. It was a time. Those sites had been built on the premise that content needed to be written "for search engines" and the team I was working in was responsible for writing "info pages", designed to support the search results pages produced on the main website. It was a travel website. There was search volume for keywords that had combinations of facets and the strategy was to create separate pages for these terms, rather than allow the search results to fulfil that function alone. The idea, if I recall correctly, was that internal links from a page with contextually relevant content about a subject matter would bolster the authority of the search results pages. These days, if you absolutely insisted on doing this, you'd want the content to be on the same page. In any case, it led to pages being created on the following topics:

• Toilet facilities in Yorkshire
• Parking in Blackpool
• Pet friendly lap dancing clubs in Manchester (OK I'm slightly exaggerating here but if you searched for this at any point we would have come up in position 1)

At the same time, companies better known for being business directories were running website building services for small businesses. From what I can tell these firms were largely staffed by grads who would be required to churn out high volumes of dry content for these sites that could be turned around in weeks, sometimes days. And these sites would rank.

Agency link building strategies from this time revolved around creating numerous articles about a subject matter, either written from scratch, or created using article spinning software. These articles would be published on article marketing sites, created solely for the purpose of passing PageRank back to the sites who paid a subscription to publish articles on there. I had colleagues who prided themselves on their ability to churn out something like 10,000 words a day about parcel delivery, or car parts, or holidays for the over 50s, or any manner of random subject matters for about ￡65 a day. This whole industry was about pumping the search engines full of content that had no intention of being written "for the user".

Then came the two major updates that radically altered the way (most of) the SEO industry did its job. Panda was designed to rid the web of spam content; Penguin was designed to rid the web of spam links. They both sent shockwaves through the industry, but anyone who is working in the industry now will know that low quality content and links are still very much a part of SEO life today. Automated content and link strategies can still be very successful today, only this morning Mark Williams-Cook shared this case study. You will have competitors outranking you and there be no rhyme or reason for it (you'll expect it's a PBN that none of the link tools know about but you'll never really know).

I wanted to write a wishlist of all the things about web content that I hope the "helpful content update" will finally clear up for us / eradicate altogether:

• Endless articles from newspapers with "headlines" like "Who is {insert celebrity name here}? Who is their husband/wife? What is their net worth?"
• Brands that nobody's ever heard of inexplicably outranking sites that, by all objective measures, have a stronger brand
• Requests from marketing agencies for SEO support where the expectation of the SEO is that they'll build some kind of keyword list and make sure the copy has been "SEO'd". Yes I do keep going on about this, but that is because it keeps happening and there's only so many times I can explain to people that there's much more to it than that. If you have the expectation that all copy needs is for it to perform well in organic search is for an SEO to sprinkle magic fairy dust on it at the end, please adjust these expectations.
• Copywriters having the POV that SEOs are somehow trying to spoil their fun / stifle their creativity by making suggestions on which keyword modifiers to integrate into the copy, which have been selected because that is what the audience is searching for, and interested in. Though if your SEO contact is just lobbing you a list of keywords, and telling you to include them a number of times, you have every right to your view. That's not SEO. SEO's role in the content creation process is to help, not hinder. If SEO and content are somehow at odds, there is definitely a problem.
• Keyword density. Get in the bin.
• "LSI Keywords". These are also not a thing. The phrase you're looking for is "related words and phrases".
• "We need E-A-T and we need it now". See what I said above about magic fairy dust. Your SEO is not going to suddenly conjure up some expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness for you. The brand needs to bring something to the table. Beware of E-A-T being peddled as "the next big thing" that's going to be the answer to this algorithm change. Please note that E-A-T has been part of Google's search engine evaluator guidelines for the last decade, at least.
• Long rambling articles about everything to do with a subject just because there is a correlation between word count and content performance.
• SEO Copywriter as a job title

I see that a lot of people are already sceptical of this update, and I see why. It's been 11 years since we were first promised something that was going to clean up the SERPs. Whether it's effective or not, I think it's going to be absolutely fascinating.