Helpful Content and SEO Core Update: a busy September

It has been a while since we have talked about search engine optimization, but it is  a world that never stops. There are always adjustments, changes and, in short, news that affect our rankings (for better or worse).

 

Over the past month, two very important events practically came together in a matter of days. With the benefit of hindsight, we analyze those events and their potential implications.

A week in advance we were informed of the launch of a specific update that would have an effect on content. Unlike previous notifications, this was not a core update of the algorithm.

 

As you know, core updates affect all sites globally (benefiting some over others), but they do not penalize. In this sense, Helpful Content seemed more "dangerous" for certain practices that we will discuss a little later.

For SEOs, these types of updates can be very frustrating. Technically, what they do are adjustments to the relevance of different URLs for certain keywords.

 

The example given by Google is actually quite graphic. Imagine that ten years ago you made a list of your favorite songused s or movies. Of course, today you would surely update it with others that would probably be above it. They have not worsened the previous ones, there are simply new ones that have surpassed them. 

 

Well, now think about webs and the parallelism is clear.

  

What is the problem? Well, if you are affected by one of these updates, there is no concrete action you can take. Google itself only refers us to a series of good practices.

 

They are certain questions that have much to do with our site:s content: its overall quality, authority, quality of production and presentation on our website ... It also invites us to make a comparison exercise with other sites to see to what extent our content stands out and what its weak point is.

 

Content, content and more content. That seems to be Google's mantra and the yardstick it mainly uses.

What we have just seen leads directly to the next Google September update, and this one is a bit more concrete. We are literally talking about an update that rewards useful content.

 

There is an interesting nuance that seems minor but has a lot of relevance, and indicates exactly what the raison d'être of this update is: the official documentation talks about content created by people and for people.

 Thanks to Artificial Intelligence and a questionable use of automation, Google's index has begun to be saturated with pages created by machines with the sole interest of getting positions among the legitimate results and then begin to monetize those results with affiliation or dropshipping.

 

This is a problem for Googles quality and, in a way, also for those of us who have a "manual" online store that competes with those pages.

Although Helpful Content Update also negatively affects those pages created and optimized, in a premeditated way, to manipulate the algorithm.

 

If you have an online store with English content (not yet available in other languages) and you think you may have been affected, or you have detected a drop in traffic in recent dates, we would recommend that you do an audit of your content and remove that:

 

 In this list you have some examples, but the basic rule is not to deceive yourself. You know perfectly well which content is created for your target audience, and which has been written solely with the intention of generating traffic from Google.

 

Once that cleaning is done, you just have to wait. This is not a manual penalty, so you have to let machine learning do its job and reinterpret the signals it receives from your site.