Google To Release Core Update From 21 August

Helpful or Cleaning up Spammy Serps?

[engine]

Google is to roll out a "helpful content update" next week, which it says is "to better ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic." It' says it should take around two weeks to roll out.

Google makes it clear that publishers should avoid creating content for search engines first, and to focus on the people-first content.

This update introduces a new site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals for ranking web pages. Our systems automatically identify content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to those doing searches.

Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that's better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.

A natural question some will have is how long will it take for a site to do better, if it removes unhelpful content? Sites identified by this update may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.

This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model. It is not a manual action nor a spam action. Instead, it's just a new signal and one of many signals Google evaluates to rank content.

Just looking at the description of this, we could see some significant shifts in the SERPs.

[developers.google.com...]

[HereWeGo123]

So google said this in their post, “Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience?” <-- I guess I can see what that means to some extent. But I think everyone is scratching their heads right now when trying to fully grasp this concept. I would assume everyone is trying to write about things that are of public interest. Why would anyone otherwise write about stuff that has no interest? And often times, looking at Google trends tool or keyword tools, it becomes a marker to help determine how relevant, popular and useful a topic is. Am I Right? I'm sure it's not black and white here. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it may mean that when you don't have a clear focus, topical relevance, nor expertise, and all you're doing is just randomly going after High search volume keywords… Maybe? What are your thoughts on this particular statement?

[BigKat]

"Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?"

That's all sales sites done for then...what a stupid statement!

Valid point. When it's Google that controls what people will see, a certain amount of a page's overall design/content would likely be created with a strong consideration to how Google interprets it. But being perfectly blunt, I don't believe anything Google says. The "Helpful Content Update" will likely help Google dig deeper into our wallets.I haven't seen any update in years that actually helped our site, which has a lot of unique info/pics/vids that help people to use the unique products we produce and sell. Google has helped Amazon, which doesn't post any of the info themselves but is mainly marketing hype posted from offshore sellers who sell inferior products.

[penitentman]

@HereWeGo123

“Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience?” <-- I guess I can see what that means to some extent. But I think everyone is scratching their heads right now when trying to fully grasp this concept. What are your thoughts on this particular statement?

In Googles dream scenario experts and enthusiast in every particular niche in the world would write content out of the goodness of their heart. After work and on weekends. Sweating out blogs for the fun of it when not at their 9-5. Maybe get a few adsense clicks while their at it for supplemental income. However, in reality 95% of people create content to make money and it's their main source of income. So we conduct SEO or change the direction of content to trending subjects. Google doesn't like this. They want someone's love and experience for a topic to shine through. This is the battle we are up against...

Has anyone seen movement yet? Can't believe they dropped this on us with a week window.

[robzilla]

I don't really understand all the confusion, the wording seems to me quite clear.

"Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?"

That's all sales sites done for then...what a stupid statement!

Sales sites aren't made for humans? Interesting statement. All they're saying is don't create content with the sole or main purpose of attracting search engine traffic without making that content helpful to the humans that make up that "traffic". A combination of the two is perfectly fine, assuming that you're not "writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience".

Essentially, don't just "traffic" people but treat them like the humans they are and make it a meaningful exchange.

I would assume everyone is trying to write about things that are of public interest. Why would anyone otherwise write about stuff that has no interest?

The key words in the line you're referring to are "simply" and "existing audience". Of course it's perfectly fine to do keyword research and target the words and phrases that people often use to find the type of content you're providing. In fact, that's what Google encourages you to do, because if your content is good then using the right phrases can help them serve it to the right people and satisfy those queries. It becomes a problem when you have a tech blog, see that Justin Bieber is trending, and decide to quickly write some content about that "simply" because it's popular, when that topic has no relation to the type of content expected by your "existing audience". It's perfectly normal to chase down popular or trending topics so long as they're relevant to your site and the content is helpful.

[mosxu]

Keep the faith,

Peter Zatko explains what is really happening …

DOJ?

[peter griffin]

Hi guys!

I think that it started. I see a big volatility today. In the morning a huge spike in traffic, than a small drop, and now another spike. It hasn't happened before.

[robzilla]

Not yet announced on the blog or Twitter. Seeing a nice uptick in search traffic starting about 7 hours ago but could very well be unrelated, I'm not really expecting the update to have that big an effect, but I welcome any (positive) surprises :-)

[Broaster]

they are issuing a SITEWIDE penalty yikes

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I don't really understand all the confusion, the wording seems to me quite clear.

I'm on the fence about clarity of the wording used, it could be better imo. While I can understand the desired behavior Google is looking for I can see how the wording may confuse. Re-read this...

"Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?"

... and ask yourself, "are people from search engines not human?" or even "is writing content that Google will like, so they let people find it, bad now?"

Ironically, if Google wants to rank content that is not "modified" to please their search algorithms they may need to stop telling people that their search algorithms reward and punish various behaviors.

It's largely a moot point imo. In the past a webmaster could apply their SEO trickery and be rewarded but in the AI future it's more likely that even trying will backfire. I wonder if this update represents that threshold being passed to be honest. We'll soon find out.

I'm seeing movement but only for a handful of pages that I compete against, my competitor's pages are gone and I'm doing slightly better as a result. Oddly they are only gone from dot com search. Mine is a hobby site focused on widgets while my competitor was an answer site trying to answer all questions. This could be naturally occuring but it's the first time in many years the competitor isn't ranked top 3 for these terms.

I'd say it's begun but I don't see any movement barometer sites posting about it yet.

[RedBar]

Not seeing anything different as yet, not even updates I did more than 2+ months ago meanwhile DDG / Bing have them ranking well.

FWIW all my global competitors and colleagues are seeing similar for several months now, May was it?

[robzilla]

... and ask yourself, "are people from search engines not human?" or even "is writing content that Google will like, so they let people find it, bad now?"

I suppose the confusion here can be seen as evidence that the wording could be improved. What is all comes down to, in a close reading, is intent. "Humans" have a need they want met. Unfortunately, this is secondary for too many webmasters, whose interest in those humans stops as soon as they've landed on the site from the search results. They're "people from search engines", it's "organic traffic", and whether those people reach their goal is apparently irrelevant. Helpfulness does not come into play nearly as much as the effectiveness in search results; it's minimum effort for maximum results.

This helpfulness update is not unlike the page speed update. For a long time, websites kept getting bulkier and bulkier and many webmasters couldn't care less about how fast (or slow, rather) their pages loaded as long as the traffic kept coming in. Obviously, this always had a very real effect on their human visitors, but it wasn't until Google "forced" them that they (begrudgingly) started optimizing... not because they had suddenly learned to care about their human visitors, but because it could hurt their rankings.

So now here we have the next thing. Every time there's the same pattern of complaints from the same webmasters who don't seem to realize that they're always a step behind. They focus so much on Google that they forget it's those pesky humans entering queries that ultimately determine the direction of the rankings.

These updates are created to improve the user experience, to satisfy query intent, but they're communicated to educate webmasters on what are actually very reasonable basic expectations: a web page should be helpful, it should be fast, it should be secure, it should be easy to use.

And it's not an either/or black or white type of thing, you can work together with the search engines to optimize your content and target the phrases that people actually use, that's the whole premise of SEO that all major search engines embrace and encourage. But your intent, first and foremost, needs to be to create helpful content.

Updates and algorithms aren't perfect, you may weather a storm or two, but, as oldog wrote, if you follow that user-centric path, you generally don't ever need to be afraid of any update in the long run.

[westcoast]

I think this is all a noble goal, but *HOW* are they determining this? I know people like throwing out the term "machine learning", but at its core most machine learning these days is still pretty simple.

So how are they gathering data for this new signal? Are they measuring and weighing "pogo sticking"? They have denied using it in the past for ranking -- are they finally using it as Bing has claimed to?

Something like A/B testing? simple example: they show Site A as #1 to 50% of people, and site B as #1 to 50% of people for query Q. Whichever results in fewer bounces or pogos of the same query gets a rank upgrade -- perhaps with some element of time on site used too. Clearly it would be more complicated than this and involve many other permutations of rankings, but the idea is to determine what results give fewest "negative outcomes" however that is measured.

[HereWeGo123]

Seeing changes in the SERPs for various KW sets. Something is brewing. I know they didn't announce, and it could very well be unrelated but given that we’re anticipating this update, any changes in traffic/SERPs is automatically attributed to this upcoming update :)

[ne0h]

Is the update started? Nothing in Twitter. And it's Wednesday already.

[rustybrick]

Nothing on [developers.google.com...] yet...

[engine]

Yep, nothing yet as far as I can see. I guess Google is still working on it.

[oldog]

I can confirm it started! Location NY , spammy travel pages that were kings for over 15 years disappeared from top 10 to oblivion,.
My dedicated website ( hotel niche ) to a popular destination at Top 4 over Hotelscombined, Kayak etc, another popular travel destination page since I made a small update a month ago ranks on #12....from #45..

[RedBar]

Siince UK midnight I have seen a definite increase in consistent hourly traffic from Japan, Oz, NZ, China and Indonesia. At the moment my Indian and Middle East traffic looks about its normal, traffic from those regions have not dropped a lot for me ... This could be an interesting day.

[ne0h]

If you look at the Twitter updates from Monday, a lot of GSC cleanup of features/additions is going on.
It seems G wants to make GSC clean before rolling out this update.

Aug 22: Video indexing introduction
Aug 22: URL level data in CWV report
Aug 24: International targeting report sunset

[Alex_1729]

Before the last update, many of my pages experienced traffic spikes. I'm seeing a bit of that now as well. You guys could be seeing the same thing.

[robzilla]

It seems G wants to make GSC clean before rolling out this update.

Doubt it. Separate teams, projects, goals, schedules, etc. But yes they're pretty active lately!

[oldog]

Rolling out ....the last 5 hours my flagship website increased traffic almost + 50% versus yesterday same time space

[SteveWrz]

Can't say I notice anything out of the ordinary on any of my sites. Although I'm not in the spaces Google has claimed to be targeting.

[ichthyous]

I think something is cooking...UK traffic has vanished this morning, down 69% so far. USA is sluggish since yesterday afternoon and starting the day at -43%.

[shadowlight]

Rolling out ....the last 5 hours my flagship website increased traffic almost + 50% versus yesterday same time space

Well its good to see something very positive on here for a change! However I've experienced big surges and dips during updates in the past before it all settles down. Not seen any noticeable changes myself yet.

I just hope this updates sole focus truly is about improving the actual SERP's for users and not just a means for G to blanket demote content to increase ad clicks further, as we all know what they say and what they actually do can be two completely different things entirely.

I hope the update does exactly what it says and those with truly useful sites see a benefit and all the trash auto generated rubbish gets demoted.

[londrum]

The important thing to remember if your traffic takes a dip is don't make any rash changes straight away, but let it all settle down for a couple of weeks at least -- i've been burned doing that before.

[sk7411]

I am pretty sure they would be tweeting it shortly. Started seeing a downward trend already for a couple of hours now. Good luck to all of you!

[engine]

DS is on holiday, so i'm sure there are priorities at play. Keep a lookout in the SERPs

[RedBar]

Global site traffic still ok today, looks like August 2021 figures.

Local UK hotel site is steaming this month already surpassing its predicted monthly total traffic with 6+ days to go plus an expected bumper weekend of music and BSB (British Super Bikes) 3 day weekend.

[BigKat]

DS is on holiday, so i'm sure there are priorities at play.

He must be the only one I know of in the tech industry that doesn't have access to the internet/social media when away from their desk. I find it odd he appears to always be on vacation during these recent updates. In other industries, when people go on vacation there is always someone available to fill the void. I guess we webmasters aren't worth that effort. And to be fair to DS, Google apparently doesn't believe his position is worth covering with other staff while he is away...