If you’re currently pumping out lots of low-value content (especially AI-created content) designed specifically to draw search engine traffic, you may soon be in for a rude awakening.
This week, Google is rolling out its latest major search update, which it calls the “helpful content update.” It’s aimed at rewarding sites with original content written by people, for people, with higher rankings on search engine results pages — and penalize sites that don’t. In its published guidance, Google encourages creating content with a specific audience in mind. It says webmasters should look to feature people-first content that demonstrates firsthand depth of knowledge or expertise if they want their sites to rank highly.
Google warns against the following:
- Using extensive automation to create content designed to boost search rankings.
- Writing to a specific word count.
- Authoring content without subject matter expertise.
- Summarizing others’ thoughts without adding value.
- Producing lots of content across different subjects to see what sticks.
With this update, Google will introduce a new, weighted sitewide ranking signal to identify low-value content. That means any content (even the good kind Google is looking for) on sites deemed to have a significant amount of unhelpful content would receive poorer search engine rankings, all other things being equal. In theory, the greater the amount of unhelpful content identified, the worse a site will rank.
Google recommends removing unhelpful content to improve or preserve rankings of helpful content. On the positive side, sites that undertake this process could expect their rankings to improve over a period of months.