Big Impact
About 1 in 8* of websites has been negatively affected by this latest change.
Helpful Content update
On September 9th, 2022, Google stated that it had finished rolling out its “Helpful Content” update for English language websites. They will roll this out in other languages over the next few months.
“Google Search’s helpful content update generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results…. Any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”
Statement from Google
Take Action
If your website was affected you can take steps to address any existing content issues now by removing ‘unhelpful content’. Your website’s SEO position should recover after a couple of months or so. If there is a big impact on revenue it is probably worth contacting an SEO expert to help.
Attributions
* Over 12% of Diib Answer Engine® Team clients have suffered a drop in Google search rankings
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