Google wants to improve the quality of search engine optimization (SEO) in the future. The company wants to reward original and helpful content more in the ranking. Uncreative and clickbait-oriented content is thus to be prevented.
Generic content, the same search results over and over again and clickbait: people who use Google’s search engine find all these things frustrating. That’s why the company is working on some SEO updates, according to its own information.
The current SEO improvements are intended to make it easier for users to find helpful information that people provide for people. Also, the refined ranking should make it easier to find authentic and useful content.
SEO puts people in the foreground of Google search
With the “helpful content update”, the company wants to take action from next week mainly against content that was created only to rank well. To achieve this, posts that are perceived as useful will be “rewarded” more.
To make it easier for content creators to create creative and value-added content, Google is providing some points of guidance to supplement the SEO guidance that has existed so far.
- Information must be directly useful to an existing or intended audience.
- Content should convey first-hand expertise, i.e. be authentic.
- Websites need a focus or even a main goal to which the content is oriented.
- Readers should be able to draw enough information from the content to achieve an appropriate learning goal. In addition, reading should be a satisfying experience.
- Content creators should follow Google’s guidelines for core updates and product reviews.
- Content should not only be optimized for the SEO tool, but should be in the interest of the reader:s first and foremost.
Google is working on improved product reviews
The company knows that reviews play an important role in purchase decisions, he said. Therefore, the update is intended to help ensure that especially helpful and detailed reviews based on expert knowledge appear in search results.
In addition, the refined SEO tool should make it even easier to search for high-quality original reviews.
SEO update: original content vs. clickbait
Google particularly wants to put an end to clickbait with the new SEO update. Topics should not only be produced in the hope that they perform well in search results.
For this purpose, the content must be free of automation, i.e. it must offer added value instead of just being a summary of other contributions. In addition, the content should leave readers:inside with the feeling that they do not need to consult any other sources on a topic.
In addition, Google does not want to support search results that promise to answer a question that in reality has no answer. This includes, for example, promised release dates for products, movies or television shows that have not yet been confirmed.
How the new SEO update works
The SEO update takes into account a new site-wide signal for ranking websites. Google’s systems then automatically detect content that has little value, adds little value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to searchers.
Websites that want to rank better in the future should remove unhelpful posts. However, it can take months for a platform that previously offered clickbait-optimized content to rank better.
Websites must first prove that they do not use clickbait
Because it is only when Google’s classification system recognizes that unhelpful content will no longer appear in the long term that the algorithm stops classifying it.
This classification process is fully automated and uses a machine learning model. It is neither a manual action nor a spam action. Rather, it is a new signal and one of many signals that Google evaluates for content classification.
Already in the coming week, Google will start with the SEO update. However, the company is initially limiting itself to English search queries. Over time, however, other languages are to be added.
