The Google Helpful Content Update is a ranking factor that measures how helpful your content is for users. It’s used in the Featured Snippets, which are shown on Google Search Results Pages (SERPs). The update affects both organic and paid results, and it’s designed to reward sites that offer users clear answers to their questions or needs. You can take steps to improve your content quality — including adding structured data markup — so it stands out from other sites that may not provide as much value for searchers.
Table of Contents
What is the Google Helpful Content Update?
The Google Helpful Content Update, also known as the HCCU, is a new algorithm that’s been introduced to improve the quality of content on the internet. It was added in 2022 and has been used by Google since then to rank websites according to their usefulness.
The HCCU works by looking at how helpful each page is based on its content and whether or not it answers users’ questions. It uses this information to rank each page accordingly. If a website has lots of useful info on it, it’ll rank higher than one with less helpful information.
How to understand the Google Helpful Content Update?
The Google Helpful Content Update is a ranking factor that measures how helpful your content is for users. It can help you earn more traffic and sales from search results, as well as get people to buy your products or services.
How does Google determine what’s useful?
The search engine uses machine learning models to evaluate whether the information in a page answers a user’s query completely and accurately, considering both its context and formatting. This may include:
- Keyword usage on the web pages that link to yours (the so-called anchor text)
- The amount of time users spend reading each page (as measured by engagement metrics)
Understanding the Helpful Content Update
The Helpful Content Update is not a filter, it’s not a penalty, and it’s not a manual action. It is not the same as Panda or Penguin. What it is, however, is an algorithmic ranking factor that measures how helpful your content is to searchers. In other words: whether or not people find your content useful (not necessarily accurate).
The update was first announced by Google on August 8th when they released their monthly “Search Quality Highlights” report for August 2019—an overview of changes that had taken place over the previous month. At this point in time it wasn’t clear what exactly this new update would measure or how exactly it would work—just that there was going to be some kind of change sometime over the next few months (aside from rolling out ranking factors like Mobile-First Indexing).
Defining “Good” Content
Google defines good content as “helpful and relevant to the user’s needs.” In addition to being helpful and relevant, good content is written in a natural, conversational tone that makes it easy to understand. It also follows the conventions of English grammar and punctuation in order to make it easier for users to read.
What can you do with this update?
As the Helpfulness Score gets more sophisticated, it’s important to know what the score means. If you don’t have a clue about how to make content more helpful, this is where you need to focus your efforts.
The Google Helpfulness Score is on a scale of 1–10. A score of 1 means that your site will probably be removed from search results if we find problems with it. A score of 10 means that users can rely on your site for answers across all their queries in Google Search.”
Is anything changing for BERT?
The Helpful Content Update is not going to affect BERT, which is a machine learning algorithm that helps search engines understand the meaning of content. As part of a larger set of changes, BERT will continue to be used in Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines and other tools.
The Google Helpful Content Update is a ranking factor that measures how helpful your content is for users.
Google wants to help users find the most helpful content on your website. And this is a good thing for you. It means that if your content is helpful and useful, it will rank higher in Google’s search results than competitors who have less helpful or even useless content.
Google uses machine learning and A/B testing to measure how well your website answers people’s questions and needs, as well as how well users interact with it. If you can improve these metrics over time, then you’re more likely to rank higher in Google’s search results!
Conclusion
We hope that you’ve learned a lot about the Google Helpful Content Update and what it means for your content strategy. The update is an exciting development in the evolution of search engine algorithms, and we’re looking forward to seeing how it impacts search results over time. While there are many factors that can impact your rankings (and those of your competitors), this new ranking factor gives us another tool to use as we work toward providing the most helpful information possible to our users.
