Since the first Helpful Content Update in 2022, the SEO world has been thinking about how to create "helpful content" or optimize it for that purpose. Hypotheses are put forward, analyses, checklists and audits are created. I look at most of these approaches with some skepticism, as the analysis findings often focus on the properties of the content itself and are derived from the perspective of a human and not a machine or algorithm. Google is a machine, not a human!
My SEO mantra is: “Think like an engineer, act like a human.”
That's why in this article I approach the topic of helpful content with the question: How Google can algorithmically identify helpful content and what makes sense.
Table of contents [ Hide ]
1 Helpful Content, what is it anyway?
2 What is helpful?
3 How can helpfulness or relevance and usefulness be measured algorithmically?
4 Identification of helpful document properties based on user signals
5 The interaction of initial ranking and reranking
6 Helpful Content has a correlation with the content, but is causal to the user signals
Helpful content, what is that anyway?
Helpful Content is a terminology that Google introduced south korea cell phone number list as part of the first Helpful Content Update in August 2022. Google initially announced that the Helpful Content System was a "sitewide classifier." It was later revealed that it would also be used to evaluate individual documents.
Our helpful content system is designed to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results, rather than content made primarily to gain search engine traffic.
Our core ranking systems are primarily designed for use at the page level. Various signals and systems are used to determine the usefulness of individual pages. There are also some site-wide signals that are taken into account as well.
I already commented in the first Helpful Content Update that this update was primarily a PR update, and not just because of the meaningful title. You can read my reasoning and criticism in detail here .
One of Google's PR goals is to encourage website operators to make crawling, indexing and thus evaluation easier. At least that was the goal of the biggest updates, such as the switch to Page Speed Update, Page Experience Update, Spam Update... These updates have one thing in common. They imply a recommendation for action through their telling, concrete title and thus help Google with information retrieval.
I would have called the Helpful Content System “User Satisfaction System.” But more on that later.
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