Google Wants Your Site's Content to Be Geared Toward Helping Real People, Not Ranking Well for Specific Keyword Phrases

Google has confirmed that the September 2023 helpful content update is now finished rolling out. The update took 14 days to roll out, starting on September 14, 2023 and ending on September 28, 2022. The update aims to help searchers find “high-quality content" and to push back on well ranked pages that were optimized with the explicit goal to rank high.

Google has been saying it for years, but it bears repeating: content that is created must be helpful for real-life users. Today's algorithms are remarkably sophisticated. As such, it's important that content is created to answer questions, solve problems, and provide people with relevant information. If, on the other hand, Google suspects the content indexed on your site is simply trying to game the system, it responds accordingly, by downgrading the domain name and the website. Among other guidelines, Google includes: an improved classifier, penalties for hosted third-party content, preference for self-assessed contents, preference for content that is reviewed by experts, preference for timestamped dates, preference for consistency in content (i.e., information that is not blindly added or removed).