Google's helpful content update: A critical recap - Search Engine Land

Google’s helpful content update officially finished rolling out Sept. 9. Now it’s important to reflect on the update, our initial assumptions and its impact on the SEO industry.

Fellow SEOs (e.g., Lily Ray, Glenn Gabe, Marie Haynes, Johannes Beus) have done a great job interpreting Google’s announcement and processing what happened on Twitter and their blogs.

Google’s announcement aroused great expectations within the SEO community. But the “big bang” never happened.

The update’s impact was only felt in a few website categories, such as ringtones, coding and lyrics pages. Its overall impact was relatively small compared to other algorithm updates.

Critical reflection and alignment between theory and practice

First, reviewing the interpretations and expectations derived from Google’s announcement and the eventual results makes sense.

Here are the core statements from Google regarding the helpful content update and my theories, which were largely derived from them.

• Focus on people-first content.
• The update was sitewide, which should affect not only individual content but entire websites’ content.
  • Observation: If you look at the strong loss of visibility for the few domains that are supposedly negatively affected by the update, you can assume a website-wide penalty.
• The recurring reference to expertise suggests that there should also be an update with E-A-T. It was assumed.
  • Observation: Does expertise play a major role in ringtones and lyrics? I do not think so! According to...

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