A lot of us have come across websites that have a great meta description and title on Google but when we visit the site and go through the content, it doesn’t provide anything relevant. It’s clear from the way the content is written that it’s written solely to impress the search engine and not the visitors.
Every year, Google launches a bunch of updates that focus on improving the Search engine and making it more useful and relevant.
Last year, Google started refining its systems to show more in-depth reviews in search results. They called this update the “Product Reviews Update”. They are now extending this approach to cater to all search results.
Starting with English searches globally, Google has launched a new “Helpful Content Update”, which aims to deliver more original, helpful content written by people in search results.
According to Google, the creators should focus on the following:
Focus on people-first content
People-first content essentially means building content that’s intended to satisfy the needs of users, while following the SEO best practices and guidelines.
If your answer to most of the questions below is yes, then you’re probably on the right track:
- Will your existing or intended audience find the content on your website relevant and helpful if they came directly to your site?
- Does your content demonstrate expertise and in-depth knowledge on the topic? (E-A-T)
- Does your site have a focus?
- Will someone reading your content feel satisfied and feel like they’ve gained enough knowledge about the topic?
- Are you keeping in mind core updates and product review guidelines?
According to Google, if you’re answering yes to most of the questions above, then you should not be impacted by the “Helpful Content Update”. In fact, you might see a boost in rankings depending on how relevant and helpful Google finds the content on your site to be.
How does the Update Work?
The Helpful Content Update is supposed to roll out this week and will start by covering English searches across the globe.
With this update, Google has launched a new site-wide signal that the company will consider while ranking web pages. The company has been making improvements in its systems to identify content that adds little to no value for those performing these searches.
It’s an automated classifier process (based on machine learning) and it’s also weighted. This means that sites with a lot of unhelpful content will experience a stronger effect as compared to sites with less unhelpful content.
Over the next few months, Google will expand this update to other languages as well.
What does “Helpful Content Update” mean for AI Copywriting tools like Jasper AI?
Well, it’s difficult to say right now. we’ll probably have to wait for a few months. Once the update has been fully rolled out and has covered more ground, we’ll know for sure.
Right now the Google systems might not be able to detect auto-generated content without the help of manual reviewers but because of the continuous improvements that Google is making, it’ll soon be able to detect AI-generated content ( using language models, such as GPT-3).
Jasper AI is one such GPT-3 software that helps generate content for websites.
As per Google’s webmaster guidelines, webmasters should avoid using any Automatically Generated Content (yes, that includes AI-Generated content) on their websites. Such sites often attract penalties and manual actions from Google.
Let’s wait and see what happens to sites that have AI-Generated content after this Helpful Content Update.
