if you are witting for search engines then its unhelpful content source twitter searchliasion
Danny Sullivan posted these on X saying, “Unhelpful content is content that’s generally written *for search engine rankings* and not for a human audience.”
August 2022 helpful content update
What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update
Focus on people-first content:
- Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
- Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
- Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
- Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?
we may satisfy this by doing seo on secondary basis but unintentionally its looks seo optimzied.
Avoid creating content for search engines first important
- Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?
Content Strategy
- Are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
Keyword cannibalization vs user intent (salifying user intent is more important)
- Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
- Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
- Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
Bounce rate & Page time
- Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
- Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t.)
EEAT
- Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
google guidelines on upcoming events and dates
- Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?
but people search for the release date to know whether its confirmed or not. (
mission impossible 9 release date (movie no filmed)
giving previous one details.
should i focus on upcoming event’s
Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?
this scenario, google first trust later identifying user signal it penalizes whole website. not crawl genuine new contents, led to lower rankings
- Are you adding a lot of new content or removing a lot of older content primarily because you believe it will help your search rankings overall by somehow making your site seem “fresh?” (No, it won’t)
How the helpful content system works
before HCU Classifier analyzes & penalize it with other ranking signals
Ask “Who,
What counts as a high-quality site?
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
Keyword cannibalization
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
Topical Authority
- Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Ads to content ratio
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
august 2022 helpful update dropped pages symptom
August 2022 helpful content update 25 Aug 2022
15 days
> railway staff nurse vacancy (thre is no vacancy in railway since 1 years). ranked well there is no present vacancy dropped.
rrb tc
kvs recruitment
10+2 jobs
staff nurse
google ranked new site and collected user signal and taken down. on page time down to 2 1minute from 1 minute.
September 2023 helpful content update
HCU 2023 Affected website examples
indgovtjobsdotin traffic down 50% 2.2M to 1.3M
content strategy updating the page about for query keyword new events monthly year wise..
or updating organization recruitment page with new job postings.
problem: ranking but no new information leading to higher bounce rate and low user engagement flagged the page as unhelpful “am expecting“.
conclusion
focus on the users other things follow automatically,
my clients made the mistakes including changing dates by republishing , search engine first content but it penalized by hcu 2022 and hcu 2023 90% drop, cleaned content but no recovery after 2 months. me too confused this also not helpful content because
its moderately meets user expectation according search rater guidelines.
refences
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content#ask-who-how-why
https://developers.google.com/search/updates/helpful-content-update
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide