How Google explains on helpful content

Every year, Google updates its algorithms by the hundreds. Beyond the niche SEO practitioners, the majority of them barely get any attention. Google Search is constantly working to provide users with more relevant results. To achieve this, they are introducing what they refer to as the "helpful content update," which is a part of a larger initiative to make sure that users see original and helpful content created in search results. The update and some considerations for creators are covered in more detail below. 

Table of content
Focus on content that puts people first.
Don't start by producing content for search engines.
Workings of the update.
 

Focus on content that puts people first

The helpful content update aims to reward content where users feel they have had a satisfying experience, while content that falls short of a user's expectations will not perform as well.

Source: Safalta

You can make sure the content you produce will be successful with the latest update by adhering to the tried-and-true advice and recommendations to make content for people instead of search engines. People-first content producers put the needs of the audience first.
If your answer is yes to the following inquiries, your people-first strategy is on the right track:

• Do you have a target market for your company that would be interested in your content if they visited you?
• Do you have the main goal or focus for your website?
• Will a reader feel they have learned enough about a subject after reading your content to aid in achieving their goal?
• Will someone reading your content get away from it feeling satisfied?
• Are you following google's recommendations for both core updates and product reviews?

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Don't start by producing content for search engines.

The best advice about putting the needs of people before anything else does not negate using SEO best practices, such as those detailed in Google's SEO guide. When used on content that puts the reader's needs first, SEO is good. The content that searchers find unsatisfying is strongly correlated with content that was produced with search engine traffic in mind.

How are you clear about putting search engines first?
If your answer is yes to the following questions, you should rethink producing content for your website:

• Is the content primarily intended for search engine users as opposed to being created with humans in mind?
• Are you creating a tonne of content on various subjects in the hopes that some of it will do well in search engine results?
• Do you use automation a lot to create content on various topics?
• Are you summarising other people's arguments without adding anything to them?
• Are you writing about topics because they are trending rather than you would write about them for your audience?
• Do readers feel like they need to recheck the sources for more accurate information?
• Because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count, are you writing to a specific word count?
• Does your content claim to provide an answer to a query that is unanswered when none has been officially announced?

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Workings of the update

With this new update, a site-wide signal is added to the list that is used to rank web pages. The systems detect content that appears to have little value, little added value, or otherwise is not very useful to users conducting searches. If there is other content from the web that is better to display, any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content have fewer chances to perform well in Search. The ranking of your other content may therefore benefit from removing unhelpful content. How long will it take for a site to perform better after it removes unhelpful content is a natural question that some people will ask.
The signal may be applied to the sites identified by this update over several months. The classifier for this update runs continuously, enabling it to keep track of both recently launched and active sites. A machine-learning model will be used to fully automate the classification. Neither spam nor manual action has been taken. Instead, it's just one of the many new signals that Google considers when ranking content.
This implies that some people-first content on websites flagged as having unhelpful content may still rank highly if additional signals are attributing to the helpfulness and relevance of the people-first content to a query. Additionally, the signal is weighted, so websites with a lot of unhelpful content might experience a stronger impact. In any case, make sure you've removed any unhelpful content and are adhering to all of our guidelines for the best success. This update initially affects English searches all over the world, and we have plans to add support for other languages in the future. We'll also make more improvements to the classifier's ability to identify unhelpful content over the coming months and launch new initiatives to better recognize content that puts people first.
  Google's Helpful Content Update is just one step in the company's commitment to giving users a better search experience.

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