Google Search Exec's Advice on Dealing With 'Helpful Content' Update - Business Insider

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• Google's "helpful content" update will punish sites that don't offer answers to questions in concise and authoritative ways.
• Product and movie review sites that aggregate reviews but don't add new information will also suffer.
• Content written by automated software isn't necessarily bad but it needs to be useful to readers.

Google is poised to upend the online world again next week when it rolls out a major update to its search engine that will derank websites it deems "unhelpful."

It's a broad mandate that Google's Search Liaison Danny Sullivan admits will likely affect all search queries. But the company is specifically targeting sites that deal with online educational materials, arts & entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.

The key he says are weeding out sites that might superficially deal with the topic a person is searching for, but are also cluttered with other unrelated content that's mostly about optimizing for Google's search results than conveying useful information.

Again, "unhelpful" is the mandate.

Sullivan spoke to Insider in advance of the rollout in coming days. Here are some of his tips on how to prepare:

Don't load webpages up with extra content you think will work well with search engines.

Sullivan said this update targets content that "has all the look and feel of a substantial article until you read it and you go: This is not really...

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