Google has started rolling out a Helpful Content System update which marks the first big update since it was initially launched back in August of this year, with the update starting to roll out on December 5th.
The update is at a global scale and will impact all languages, which will help Google’s systems detect more forms of low-quality content created for search engines and not primarily for the purpose of users/people.
Google said that they “released the December 2022 helpful content update, which improves our classifier and works across content globally in all languages. The rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.”
“To learn more about how to create content that’s successful with the helpful content system, see our help page on how to create helpful, reliable people-first content, rather than search-engine first content. It has questions that you can ask yourself when assessing your own content.
A natural question some will have is how long will it take for a site to do better, if it removes unhelpful content? Sites identified by this system may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content hasn’t returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.
Periodically, we refine how the classifier detects unhelpful content. When we do this in a notable way, we share this as a “helpful content update” on our Google Search ranking updates page. After such an update finishes rolling out, and if the refined classifier sees that content has improved, then the unhelpful classification from our previous classifier may no longer apply.”
