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In August, Google has its ‘useful content’ algorithman update to its search process designed to boost content written for peoplewhile simultaneously devaluing content written primarily for SEO.
According to a announcement on Twitter the week before the rollout, the update would ‘ensure people see more original, useful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic.’ It’s worth noting that while in the past product review updates only targeted specific types of pages, the ‘useful content’ update was site-wide. The implications were, and still are, huge – because this change to the algorithm has the potential to have an impact everyone pages.
What were some of the implications of the update?
According to Google:
Any content—not just useless content—on sites that are determined to have relatively large amounts of useless content in general is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there’s other content elsewhere on the web that does better is to display. For this reason, the removal of useless content help the ranking of your other content.
In other words, the update introduced a whole new ranking signal to negatively score websites that publish a high volume of either low-value content or content otherwise deemed unhelpful to searchers.
While Google did give nominal notice about the changes to its search algorithm, a week was really no time at all to prepare. Businesses spanning every sector and every industry have scrambled to clean up their websites and weed out ‘unhelpful content’ wherever possible. The stress was palpable. But that said, one could certainly argue on the flip side that every website should always have been written for people in the first place, as opposed to SEO. While the competition across the digital landscape has obviously grown more intense than ever before, that’s not always how things played out in reality.
Could Google’s Useful Content Update Affect Your Business?
If it sounds like you’re running exactly the kind of website that’s full of so-called ‘unhelpful content’ that Google has warned about, don’t worry too much – the tech giant recommends that you simply remove it from your site. In theory, this should at least be enough to improve your search value increase you on the search engine results page (SERP) back to the best position you need to be in to be seen by users far and wide, by customers old and new, who will only consider clicking through to your website if you rank alongside trusted competitors. A number of new clients at my own performance marketing and web design agency, Pixelatedexperienced this first-hand, having come on board in the wake of the August update, but for some reason was either unsure of its implications or unaware that it had been rolled out in the first place.
That said, it’s worth noting that if you’re just now finding out about the ‘useful content’ algorithm and reacting accordingly by removing low-quality content from your site, it could take as long as a few months to feel the benefit. This is because Google does not continuously monitor the overall quality of the content on your site, but instead performs “crawls”, during which its Search faculties periodically return to your site to evaluate any changes to its usability and usability since the last time it visited. . Google then adjusts your position in its search rankings.
The tech giant goes on to note that Google Search monitors both newly launched websites and existing websites, and since it determines that the useless content has not returned in the long term, classifying the website as low quality will no more money. .’
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