The Significant New Google Update that Could Radically Change Online Content Forever

What will the new Helpful Content Update mean for the SEO world and how far reaching could its effects be felt?

Well here we are facing the dawn of a significant brand new Google search algorithm update, this one designed to target content deliberately gamed to rank prominently in search results.

New algorithm updates always frighten SEO professionals and anyone heavily involved with websites reliant on search traffic because there's so much at stake. If you make your living from a website that pulls in a regular number of customers each month, the majority of whom are delivered from Google, the prospect of Google closing that door as it jumbles up the ranking landscape can be frightening. Many businesses live or die by the algorithm so it's understandable to feel some trepidation when the Big G announces a major change such as this one.

What Exactly Is This New Update?

Google often names its major algorithm updates and sometimes the names bear no relation to their aims and effects (Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird for example) whereas other updates can be unleashed with fairly descriptive names (the Page Layout Algorithm and Exact Match Domain update for instance). Google don't always name their updates themselves and often make significant changes to the algorithms with minimal communication to the wider world, which is when the SEO community will tend to come in and apply their own names to these updates instead.

In this instance we've been given a descriptive name for the latest algorithm update from the horse's mouth. The Helpful Content Update will aim to promote content that is, unsurprisingly, helpful to human readers, over that which has been produced to appeal primarily to search engine spiders (the bots that crawl and index the web).

How it works exactly is a closely guarded secret and Google never reveal precisely what goes into that special sauce and how it will be changing but on this occasion they have briefed the webmaster community in advance with broad guidelines that content creators should adhere to. How big an impact will this have? We simply don't know yet, but the signs so far suggest this is going to be a not insignificant update, which could cause considerable turmoil to those sites falling foul of the new best practice guidelines. It's particularly notable that Google are pre-warning of the update's imminent rollout, given that in the past they have frequently implemented updates without giving any advance notice.

To understand the potential impact of this algorithm update we need to first go back and assess how past major updates have been felt...

A Potted History of Google Updates and Their Effects

One of the reasons Google has consistently remained the dominant search engine of choice for a vast majority of the world (I wrote previously on just how huge its market share has become - see my Yep article, but spoiler alert, Google has a 91% share of global search traffic) is its dedication to evolution. For most users it just performs better than rival search engines when it comes to quickly retrieving desired relevant information.

A primary factor in Google's ability to stay at the top of the pile is its regular introduction of algorithm updates that materially impact how search results are generated and ranked. In effect, to combat websites from being able to play the algorithm, they need to keep that search algorithm fresh. Once its become apparent that the quality of results is being influenced by SEO-savvy site owners or their marketing partners, Google recognise the need to react with an update that shakes up how sites are assessed in order to determine their prominence in search results.

So let's take a look at some of those major updates of the past and what they changed.

Florida - November 2003

One of the earliest named updates that caused waves, Florida was unleashed with little warning and immediately sent shockwaves through the SEO community. Though Google have never explicitly revealed its primary intent, it is commonly accepted that this update targeted the types of backlinks different sites had pointing to them.

By this point it was well known just how valuable backlinks had become to achieving competitive rankings in search, so there were thousands of nefarious techniques that were being used to improve a site's total backlink count. The Florida update came along and devalued en masse a huge volume of those links, wiping businesses from the search results overnight.

Jagger - September 2005

This was another update targeting low quality backlinks as well as negatively impacting sites that fell foul of certain technical guidelines around refresh rates and those with duplicate content issues.

Big Daddy - December 2005

This was an unusual move from Google and significant within the SEO community as the search giant actively sought feedback on testing of this update. However it didn't actually cause major ranking fluctuations like many of its successors. It was billed as another update targeting low-quality or paid-for links (paid links not marked as paid links are strictly against Google guidelines).

Vince - January 2009

Named after a Google engineer who had been influential in this update's rollout, Vince essentially gave a boost to big brand websites. It readjusted the ranking landscape so that lower quality sites that had been optimised to outrank a better known branded site would lose that benefit. It was bad news for a lot of affiliate sites trying to trade off brand names of companies whose products or services they'd earn referral commission for.

Caffeine - June 2010

This update wasn't actually an algorithm update, rather a reconfiguration of the indexing system. It allowed Google to crawl and index fresh content from all sources far more quickly. From an SEO perspective it didn't have a huge negative impact on any specific sites losing visibility but has shaped the way we look at content freshness ever since.

Panda - February 2011

One of the most notorious of all Google algorithm updates, there are still SEO folk who shudder at the mere mention of this one. Panda was unleashed to target sites with low quality content and it tore through the business models of sites rehashing other people's content for their own gain.

Freshness - November 2011

Following on from the Caffeine update, this algorithm update placed heavier weighting on recent or topically relevant trending content. It impacted a whopping 35% of all search queries at the time it was launched as publishers relying on dated content to rank for recurring events suddenly lost ground to those sites delivering fresh content around those events.

Page Layout - January 2012

This one was all about user experience and effectively penalised sites that were pushing too many static ads to users before they could get to the content they were after. Publishers had to rethink where and how they positioned their valuable revenue generating ads, leading to the more and more creative (and often frustrating) ways of getting commercial content in front of our eyes we see today.

Venice - February 2012

This update rebuilt the way in which localised search results were delivered to users and gave a leg up to smaller local brands competing with national and international chains. Instead of searching "Italian restaurant" and having a load of corporate websites appear for well known chains, Google could now pick out specific restaurants in any given locality and return these results to users who weren't hiding their location.

Penguin - April 2012

Just like the Panda update before it, Penguin is a particularly renowned major algorithm update that had huge ramifications for sites that had "unnatural" or very low quality backlink profiles. As more people cottoned on to the value of backlinks, trading of these links effectively became an online black market economy and the Penguin update was designed to combat the effectiveness of picking up often irrelevant links in bulk.

Exact Match Domain (EMD) - September 2012

In an era when domains with valuable keywords in them were changing hands for considerable sums, the EMD update came along to try and prevent low quality sites being slapped up on these keyword-rich domains and earning competitive rankings by virtue of the domain name alone. I actually think you still too often see pretty poor sites ranking well for a keyword just because the keyword is in their domain, so this update could do with a refresh!

Payday - May 2013

Named after the notoriously spammy payday loans industry that was among the many offenders this update aimed to penalise, the idea with the Payday update was to go after commonly disreputable sites such as online casinos, underground pharmaceutical companies and those of an adult nature. Because these types of site were so heavily subject to shady "blackhat" SEO techniques it was an effort to combat the huge volumes of spam they were generating in order to gain clicks from search.

Hummingbird - August 2013

Another update that Google provided very little information on, Hummingbird came along and essentially rewrote the entire core algorithm to make it faster and more accurate. Despite being a seriously big deal in terms of the evolution of search, its effects weren't widely felt in the short term and it is now considered more of a building block towards further advances such as with machine learning and AI.

Pigeon - July 2014

This update was effectively an extension of the earlier Venice update which had significantly improved the way local search queries were handled.

RankBrain - April 2015

Another huge evolution in Google search, RankBrain was more than just another algorithmic adjustment, this was a fundamental shift in how Google functioned. It was the dawn of machine learning to provide higher quality relevant search results and better determine user intent for any given query.

Mobile-friendliness - April 2015

Also dubbed "mobilegeddon" by many in the SEO world this update followed the growing user trend towards using mobile devices for search and lead Google to promote guidelines on how sites should look and behave on mobile devices. Non-responsive sites or those which didn't have a dedicated mobile version could no longer expect to rank prominently for users searching on mobile.

Quality - May 2015

This was originally known as the "phantom update" owing to the fact that Google remained tight-lipped about its rollout until long after it had been introduced. There have been multiple quality updates since, but this was the first to really rework what the Panda update before it had begun: namely devaluing low quality content.

Florida 2 - March 2019

First up you may note there's a pretty big gap between updates at this point as Google have now tended to make fewer notable algorithm updates, instead constantly tweaking the core algorithm using machine learning.

That said, the core algorithm was tweaked in such a major fashion at this point that it became deserving of its own name, and Florida 2 came into being although it's officially known by Google as the March 2019 broad core update. Updates of this fashion don't tend to have any specific targets in mind, rather they work on how the core search algorithm runs. This makes it very difficult to know how to recover lost rankings for those sites impacted by the rollout of this change.

Featured Snippets - August 2019

Ever since featured snippets (those short passages of descriptive text extracted from a website that are displayed at the top of search results for certain queries) were introduced in 2014, marketers and content creators alike have been fighting their rivals in order to grab what's often known as the "position zero" search result. This update improved the way Google selected appropriate snippets of information to use, giving heavier weighting to fresh content.

BERT - October 2019

An acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, BERT was designed to help Google better understand natural language and conversational queries. At a time when voice assistants were becoming more popular, search had begun to evolve to a point users were more comfortable asking proper questions of their devices, instead of simply typing a mashup of two or three primary terms such as "restaurants Oxford", which isn't a phrase anybody would use by itself in conversation with other people.

Page Experience - June 2021

This update came along to help promote the usability of websites, putting heavier weighting on metrics such as load speeds (making Core Web Vitals a household name if you're in the online marketing world), security, mobile optimisation and overuse of intrusive interstitials.

Which leads us to now, as we brace for what may very well be one of the biggest algorithm updates in years: the Helpful Content Update.

Which Sites Will be Affected by the Helpful Content Update?

In truth nobody knows for sure at this point. But the likelihood is that this update will be targeted at sites heavily relying on AI-powered content-automation tools to generate content en masse (for more on this see my previous post - Machine Learning, AI and Content Automation), based on what these tools have learned from other successfully ranked content.

You've likely often come across content on the web which doesn't read entirely naturally and this is often a telltale sign that it has been engineered to appeal to search engines first. It is a common recommendation of SEO tools (and many SEO "experts") to jam chosen keywords into your body copy of a page's content numerous times. This is fine if your keyword is Fruit Salad on a page talking about making a great fruit salad. But if the keyword you're targeting traffic from is How To Build An App In Python, that phrase can appear in your page title and at the beginning of your content fairly naturally but each additional time you crowbar it into the content will likely look unnatural.

It's why you might have seen sections of content that round off with lines like "read on for the next steps in our how to build an app in Python guide" or "if you've previously been struggling with how to build an app in Python these next steps should help".

It's not majorly out of place, just seems a little clunky to the average user because we don't tend to need to be constantly reminded of the article we're reading's focus. If anything it can feel somewhat patronising and it is likely these sorts of overengineered attempts at winning search traffic are going to suffer following the update's rollout.

How Can Sites Prepare for the Helpful Content Update?

Google have shared guidelines - what creators should know about the Helpful Content update. It's all pretty basic stuff and there are no simple tick boxes or SEO-by-numbers easy fixes. That said, Google frequently offer guidelines on what should and shouldn't work for ranking purposes, even though in the wild these guidelines are frequently ignored by sites clearly able to still yield results. You may recall I earlier highlighted how the EMD update was meant to prevent domains with keywords in them automatically ranking for those keywords, over more relevant sites.

Consider the search term Oxford Web Design. It's worth an average of 880 searches per month and competition is unsurprisingly pretty high. Type that into Google and the top two organic results have Oxford Web in their domains. Of course they might also be the very best resources for this search query (though personally I'd suggest urbanelement.com would be a far better option at the top of the rankings here!) but this is far from uncommon to have the top results having an exact match domain. Ultimately what Google say and what Google do aren't always the same.

That's not to say we should ignore the latest guidelines and certainly I'll be closely monitoring the effects of this new update's rollout, but Google's constant desire to stamp out effective SEO tactics once they become commonplace hasn't always worked in the past. They've claimed for decades now that links that are paid for and not marked as such (using the rel=nofollow attribute) will not be considered when assessing a site's authority credentials and ultimate ranking position. But the web is awash with link brokers and "paid outreach" agencies because paying for links does ultimately still work a lot of the time, even if it is a risky business.

Just pull up the backlink profile of any major brand in a fiercely competitive space such as car insurance or online gambling (we digital marketers can do this with specialist tools) and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of links from sources that have barely made an effort to hide the fact their links are for sale to the highest bidder. For the record I don't recommend buying links, even if there are countless examples of sites succeeding using this tactic.

What Happens Next?

I'm afraid at this point all we can do is sit and wait to see how the update impacts rankings once it is rolled out. A recent poll by SEO guru Aleyda Solis suggested that the majority of SEO specialists have no plans to try and make changes to content in advance of the update's rollout. There are really too many unknowns to be taking a baseball bat to your site's existing content in preparation for the Helpful Content update. Best advice I've got is to keep calm and remain confident your content hits the mark. After all, if your content isn't good enough as things are, you should already be addressing how to improve it.