September 2023 Helpful Content Update is Around The Corner!

Why is Helpful Content important?

Let us remind you real quick – Helpful Content Update aims to eliminate content written solely for the purpose of positioning in search engines, which does not bring any value to users. The update is intended to guarantee that low-quality content does not rank high in the SERPs.

You can read more about the original update in our news: New Google Helpful Content Update Is Out Now.

But let’s not focus on the past, because it is September 14, 2023, that we want to talk about here. What does the latest update to Helpful Content bring?

Changes after the Helpful Content update. How will it influence your SEO?

Source: https://twitter.com/googlesearchc

No more link farms?

The update is aimed at, among others, spammy link farms set up on WP or Blogspot subdomains. What does this mean for you? It is worth taking a look at whether such places appear in your link building process and observing what will happen to them – for example, in accordance with Google’s instructions, will they be blocked and not indexed?

Update your content. But for real this time

The update is also intended to punish sites that manipulate rankings by changing dates without actually updating the content. So if you tried to improve the condition of your blog by only changing the date, such practices will no longer work, on the contrary – they may bring you more harm than benefit.

AI in the spotlight (again)

Interestingly, the phrase “written by people” has disappeared from the documentation — we can suspect that this will open the way to actions on AI content; the question remains how long, so I wouldn’t trust this update 100%.

Source: https://twitter.com/rustybrick/

Not only rewarding, but also punishing?

As we can read on SE Roundtable, “This update promotes useful content, but will soon lower the positions of unhelpful content.” Google doesn’t mention penalties directly, but after reading the documentation, we can expect that it won’t just be an incentive to create better content.

And what’s next?

Traditionally – we are waiting! If you know that there is content on your website that may be affected by this algorithm, edit it. This especially applies to online educational materials, entertainment, shopping (i.e. broadly understood e-commerce), and technology-related content.

Will the update bring more good to sites that create valuable content? Maybe. The update, as you can see from the documentation, focuses on several main aspects of unhelpful content, but we don’t know much more about the positive impact on quite nice content created with users in mind.