September 2023 Google Helpful Content Update

This update rolled out on the 14th of September and it took about 13 days to roll out , so I finished around around about the 27th 28th of September . Now this update is probably the biggest I've seen affecting the community since Penguin or Panda , you know , over 10 years ago .

Now , I have to admit I've had no negative impact from this update on any of my sites , so I'm not speaking from personal experience here in terms of how we've been affected , but just talking to other people , seeing other people talking online . This has obviously hit huge numbers of niche sites and all sorts of sites , and it's really appended a lot of people .

Okay , so for we deep dive , let's think about what Google Search Helpful Content System actually is , and this is from their own help documents . They say Google Search Helpful Content System generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original , helpful content created for people in search results .

So the key things here are it's an automated system , it's site-wide and it's based on machine learning . So they've got some classifiers that they've developed , most likely from taking feedback from Google raters manual raters who've gone and classified a whole subset of websites to say whether they're helpful or not .

And if your website has fallen into that classification as defined by the machine learning systems , then you're going to get hit by this update . Now , the update , they say , is graded , so you might have been marginally affected by it or you may be heavily affected by it , depending on how far into the classifier you've fallen .

Okay , so now , knowing this , how do you know if you've been affected ?

Well , if your analytics show a massive drop in search traffic from starting anytime around the 14th of September over the following two weeks , then you know you've been hit , and I mean some of the falls I've seen reported like 80 , 90% of traffic from Google just literally disappearing overnight . So if you've been hit badly , you'll know you've been hit badly .

So now , what do you do if you've been hit on ? My first piece of advice would be to be very careful on what advice you actually listen to .

Now , I know that's ironic because I'm here giving you advice , but I've seen plenty of people out there giving some very , very weird advice , some of it based not on any facts that I can see whatsoever , some of it being given before the update even been finished rolling out . So it's still early days .

So I would very much caution you , before you start making any major changes , to question every bit of advice you're given , including mine , and to just and , if you can afford to , to wait and see . Going back to previous experiences , I've had a major updates like Penguin and Panda . It took months to figure out what was going on .

It took months and years to make changes that fully recovered things . So I don't think you're going to find anyone with a quick , simple hit and simple change . There's no switch that can just be flicked to make it all better . So if anyone promises that they can do that , then I would take it with a very big pinch of salt .

So that's the first advice just be wary of any advice you're given and think how can the person given advice know with certainty what they're telling you ? So the more certain someone is , the more caution I would advise . The next piece of advice I'd just like to give them .

This is one where I feel there is maybe a bit of certainty based on information that we've been given . Now , it's been seen that in lots of areas where people's niche sites have been demoted because they've been hit by the classifier , so they've been demoted in the rankings , they've been overtaken by sites like Reddit and Quora user-generated content sites .

Now , to start with , a lot of people have done that and thought , oh , google's actually promoting these user-generated content sites . Therefore , user-generated content on my blog or website will fix the problem . Now Google have since said and I've no reason not to believe them that the helpful content update is only demoting things .

So if you are seen to be incredibly helpful content , they're not actually promoting you at the moment . They're not giving you a boost if you're helpful . This classifier is literally just to demote content that it doesn't believe is helpful .

So all that we're seeing in this case is the Reddit and Quora , on these particular search terms , just ranking where they would have done without those previous sites that are ranking above them being there . So those previous sites have been demoted , which has caused Reddit and Quora to be rated higher .

They're not put there because they're being seen as more helpful . They're just there because of the sites that are seen as less helpful have been demoted below them . So that's the first one . If anyone's suggesting plus to your site with user-generated content , I would be very cautious on that one . I don't think that's gonna be a quick fix .

Next , I've seen some people suggest that the problem is with affiliate sites or display advertising . Now , that's not to say that sites with affiliate links and advertising haven't been hit . They have , but I don't think that's the reason they've been hit .

It's just because there's still plenty of other affiliate sites and display advertising sites that are doing absolutely fine . So again , this is where correlation and causation are not the same thing . Just because some sites that have been hit match this criteria doesn't mean all have . So it's one that I would potentially discount at the moment .

It's not to say that you can't overdo ads or you can't do affiliates linking in a bad way . That might hurt you , but what I would say is I don't think that it's a fundamental cause of any problems , so that's not one that I would look at as a major cause . So where do we look next ?

Google themselves provide a really useful document called creating helpful , reliable people . First , content . Now , I'm not the kind of person who says believe everything Google say , but sometimes they provide quite big hints and it's worth at least paying attention to the things they publish here . I'll put a link to this page that I'm discussing in the show notes .

Now I'm not gonna go through the every single thing that they suggest to do here , but they give you a checklist of questions to ask yourself so you can self assess your content to see if you're meeting the criteria that they're setting , and I don't think you have to meet every single question here with a positive answer , but I think you need to pick out as

many as possible . Now , if you read through it , to me , what this says is really fundamentally , are you an authority in the topic that you're covering on your website ? And this is where it comes back to having a plan for your website , becoming a topical authority on your website and building an authority website .

So it's all about authority and this is where it goes back to making sure that your site meets the intent of the people searching and finding it and reading it and using it . Two of the key concepts that they discuss in this document is to focus on people first content and avoid creating search engine first content . So what can we take from this ?

Well , as I keep banging on about , anyone who's listened to any of these podcasts , is that basically , you need to make a site that answers people's questions , because people go online , they search on Google to get an answer to a question . The question might be quite broad or it might be quite narrow , but they're fundamentally going on there to learn something .

They're trying to get an answer . So you need to answer those questions for people . Creating search engine first content .

That's where people look at volume and say I want the most amount of people with the least amount of effort , and they create pages and create content based on volume rather than on necessarily building authority or providing good coverage on a topic .

So , yeah , this to me goes back to fundamentally thinking about how you architect your site for the purpose that it's for and that it should be .

You should be aiming to become an authority , and to become an authority , you've got to answer people's questions in depth and cover the topic broadly and in depth , and this is where I think some of the examples of people have shared of their sites that have dropped , fall down . Now they focus on the number of posts and it's just post , post , post , post .

They focus on getting a certain number of posts out of a day or a week or a month and while the topic of the site might be have a relation to each other , the actual , the sort of the content posting is just they're all standalone . There's no real hierarchy to why different posts relate to each other .

They don't kind of back each other up and they don't cover a topic or an area in depth . A lot of these I've seen a travel sites where people might just be talking about an individual hotel or an individual resort and or things to do in a particular city , but they don't seem to have any hierarchy , they don't link to each other very well .

They're all very standalone , just in a way like just a blog role . There's no sort of hierarchy to the site .

So I think this is one thing where , tensely , people are falling down by not having , they're not really building topical authority , they're not interlinking their pages , they're not creating those clusters of content around certain topics to build that authority .

Now , if that doesn't make much sense to you , here's an example of what I mean , the kind of thing I mean that everyone will be familiar with . So if you go to Wikipedia and you start on the subject , notice how the interlinking in Wikipedia works really , really well .

You can completely explore a whole subject area in Wikipedia from any starting point because it will link well between all the different entities within that article so that you can easily explore more . You don't need to generally go back to Google to ask a further question on the subject .

You can explore within Wikipedia quite naturally using the interlink in the hierarchy they've got set up there to fully understand the topic . And that's what I've seen is lacking in a lot of these sites that I've seen that have been hit .

They might have a great article on a particular thing , like a diner in New York , for example , but there's no interlinking within it . There's no where do I go next ? Or other examples that they just have the one article .

So I think you need to start looking at your , your articles and your pages , your posts , as a bigger whole and how they all relate to each other , so that people can come to the site and then navigate around it and get the information they need and the next steps within the site without having to come out and search again .

That appears to me to be potentially one of the big issues with these sites that are being deemed as not that helpful . So what should your next steps be ?

If you've been hit by this update , well , I would strongly suggest going to the Creating Helpful Content page that I'll link to in the show notes and readings through there and seeing if you hit any of the things in there , because there are some very blatant examples .

For example , does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer , such as suggesting there's a release date for a product to move your TV show when one isn't confirmed ?

I mean , if you're doing things like that and that's what you're relied on , then I think you've probably that content you've got there is probably gone and is never going to be useful again .

But if you're not doing any of the things like that , then I think you need to look at how your site hierarchy is set up , how your site layout is done , so that you can potentially rescue that content and start to relate all your content to each other and put in those missing pieces to give you the topical authority in areas .

That's what I would be looking at . That's very similar to what we had to do back in the day with Panda , where we had lots of content that was very thin and not really related . We had to find the relationships between content . We had to build the missing pages that brought them all together , and that's possibly the closest thing that I can see .

This is to previous updates that have been done . I mean , the other thing I would suggest is to not do anything rash , not to do anything that you can't reverse out of , and to get a broad range of input , as much input as you can , from other people .

Read other people's experiences , read what Google is saying , always read between the lines , and I can only further offer the advice based on my experience , which is not to chase keyword volume , not to chase content schedules , not to chase a lot of the things that people say you should chase , but instead just to go back to basics and focus on questions people

ask . That's the reason I built Keywords . People Use to find those questions that people ask , because you rank by answering people's questions . You're useful by answering people's questions and you build topical authority by answering people's questions . I hope this has been useful . I know how painful it is to be hit by an update .

I've been there myself in the past but trust me , if you don't give up , you will get better from this . Your sights will get better . Your income will get better . It's painful in the short term , but in the long term you will be better off . But you've just got to stick with it . Don't give up . Good luck . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it .

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I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at KeywordsPeopleUsecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard .