Google’s Helpful Content update was released on December 5th and will take approximately two weeks to fully implement. It improves our classifier and works across all languages and content globally.
How did the system for Helpful Content work?
Google’s content system seeks to recognize useful content that provides visitors with a positive experience, and will not reward pages that fail to meet their visitors’ expectations.
This system will generate an automated ranking signal across the site, which will then be considered alongside other signals when ranking websites. Furthermore, their systems can detect low-value or unhelpful content.
If other indicators point to it being helpful and relevant to a query, search ranking signals may still be positive for sites with some people-first content. The effect is more noticeable on pages with a lot of useless information.
What does the Helpful Content update for December mean for your website?
A common question is how long it takes for a website to improve after removing unhelpful content. Google’s classifier is always running, so it can look at both existing and newly opened websites.
The classification will no longer be applicable once the system detects that the unnecessary content has not resurfaced in the long run. The signal may be applied to sites identified by this system over several months.
Google Search received a link spam update in December 2022.
Google will begin using Spam Brain, its AI-based spam prevention system, following this update. This will be useful for more than just detecting spam; it will be able to detect when sites are buying links and when sites are used to pass outgoing links.
The update occurred on December 14th and took two weeks to complete, so it should be completed by January 2023.
What does this mean for your website?
Most sites should not be affected by this, but if you have acquired or purchased a large number of spam links, these will be removed. This will most likely have an impact on your page authority and ranking because credit from “unnatural links” will be lost.
Google defines spam links as “links obtained primarily to artificially manipulate search rankings.” As a result, their strategy is to level the playing field so that pages with relevant and helpful links receive the ranking benefits they are due.
Google’s most recent change to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T receives an additional E for Experience.
Google’s search rater guidelines have undergone significant changes. Although they regularly update their guidelines with numerous improvements throughout the year, they’ve added much more new content this time, including the addition of another letter E to the beginning of the popular acronym E-A-T.
Another E for Experience has been added to E-A-T. As a result, this critical ranking concept now reads:
E – Experiential
E – Experience
A – Authority.
T – Trustworthiness
This new feature means that Google will evaluate content based on the content creator’s first-hand experience with the topic. For example, if someone is looking for a way to make authentic Italian pasta, someone who has firsthand experience making pasta will most likely rank higher. Stay up to date with our algorithm and search industry round-ups. Contact us today for more information on these posts or to know how we can help you with your SEO!