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Guess what? Google has officially confirmed that the December 2022 Google Helpful Content Update is rolling out. This will be the second launch of this system is getting since its start this past summer. Google started the system update on December 5th but waited until December 6th to announce that it was in the rollout process.
The Specs
The first rollout of Google’s helpful content system was only hitting low-quality content in English. Well that’s changed now since this system update is looking at all languages and weeding out the good from the bad across the board. Another notable feature of this system update is the new signals added.
Google’s list of search ranking systems has been updated with the most recent information about the helpful content system. Remember, this system is designed to single out low-quality content that isn’t written for users first. Sure, ranking on Google is important but writing content for people first is key to having good content. A computer won’t tell you if something is boring to read, but a real person sure will.
Google says that the helpful content update will “tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines.” While Search Engine Roundtable reports “if you are writing content to drive search engine visibility and traffic, you might be hit by this type of update, and non-English sites are no longer safe from this update.”
How The Last Update Went
Around September 9th, SEOs and users alike started noticing fluctuation and believed that it was attributed to the first rollout of the helpful content update. But after a couple days, it was noted that this could not be the cause for changes in ranking. Barry Schwartz says “I believe a good percentage of that 20% are confused and misattributing the changes they see to the wrong thing – i.e. it is not the helpful content update.”
Basically, everyone thought that the first system update was going to shake things up but in reality it didn’t. So the question remains, will this system supersede expectations or will it flop?
Your Helpful Content Reference Guide
The good news is that Google has another treated for users alongside this system update. Since the launch, they’ve updated their Helpful Content Update Document.
As we’ve heard from Google in the past few months, the reference is going to be less to update and more to system. So that type of language use has been updated alongside details like its global rollout in all languages. You can check it out on Google Search Central for the full low down.
