What Did The Latest Google Updates Bring?

Google's been dealing with many market hurdles. Social media platforms such as TikTok are bringing about a new way for humans to find information: we are headed towards information discovery instead of information search. On top of this, governments are setting up legal frameworks to restrict cookie usage but also asking for more accountability when it comes to disinformation online. As a result, Google is adapting and aiming to provide more qualitative, trustworthy content delivered in a way that suits new customer expectations.

These updates are almost always made to improve the user experience of Google search users and fight irrelevant, spammy, and untrustworthy content.

To improve user experience with user search outputs. Google Core sole purpose is to improve the quality of digital outcomes.

Content specialists, marketing specialists, digital PR experts and SEOs should be paying close attention to HCU.

SEOs, content marketers, and marketing generalists should all pay special attention to this update. There is no sense in producing unhelpful content. It disappoints/annoys the users and it clutters the SERPs with junk.

AI content will continue to cause problems for Google. HCU, in my opinion, was mainly an effort to fight spammy AI content. However, I believe that Google will always be fighting against all types of bad content because it causes their customers (the searchers) to have a bad experience.

All marketers should recognize the importance of helpful content and the HCU. Things like E-A-T in the QRG and Panda before HCU are all part of Google's overall war on bad content.

These types of updates will continue. Producing bad content with the sole purpose of ranking is a fool's errand.

Anyone that is writing copy. This specifically is looking at the writer using AI tools that create junk. Just like SPAM, this is an improvement on Panda to clean up the web. AI without human rechecks is now making junk. This is the antidote.

First and foremost: do not delete your content in one fell swoop. You need to evaluate WHY the content was created, WHO the target audience is, WHAT the content is going to help them accomplish, WHEN it was written and WHERE that content should live. Once that is done, you can begin to map out what should be updated, rewritten to align with search intent and audience expectations or what should be deleted/merged/moved.

Up your content game, plain and simple. If you have thin, spammy, or just plain bad content on your website, either update it with better content or replace it altogether.

Unfortunately, this update is one that, in my opinion, will take time and hard work to recover from. If you were running the risk by producing bad content, it's now time to pay the piper.

They should first check out the SERP competition and see who was and wasn't affected. Those who weren't, see what factors are involved and replicate. Remember, Google is not your competition.

No. Technical SEO is about making sure content can be discovered, crawled and indexed properly. The nature of the content impacts this process but it in now way diminished the importance of technical SEO.

Not at all. Google is still a machine. Google's algorithms rely on things like schema and metadata to get a complete picture of what they're looking at.

And mobile usability and website speed will continue to be of great importance to SEOs. Core Web Vitals are only going to increase in importance and may have an increasing impact on the rankings of a website.

So, no, these updates are simply part of a much bigger picture. Technical SEO will continue to be important and the parameters of technical SEO work will continue to evolve.

Not at all. Each part of the band is required to make the music. That's like saying, the drummer is getting better, does the singer still matter? All parts of the band matter and all parts of SEO does as well. You need harmony, rhythm, and amplification to make it all work.

It's not a question of niches for me. It's a question of: does this content bring tangible added value to the humans it was created for. If the content wasn't created for human consumption but simply to satisfy a search engine in order to rank, this is where you will have a problem. With this in mind, many affiliate websites, celebrity stats websites, etc. would probably suffer.

I think it's too early to make these kinds of determinations. From what we've heard in the last few weeks from Google, I think it will take some time before we have a clear picture of the winners and losers of the helpful content update.

The digital marketing niche is littered with agencies trying to game the system. These sites were struck first and for good reason. The next would be "health" — again because of affiliate gaming and using AI tools to spin and crank out content.

I know my website and my clients' websites did! Content I write to help people understand how certain things work in SEO and how to actually DO things work really well. The reason is that I address these elements in a more approachable manner than the official documentation available out there does.

Again, it's still too soon to know for certain. I believe that over time, if this update really is to do what Google says, the winners will be websites that feature content that is trustworthy and satisfies the need of the searcher.

Sites that were focused on achieving the user intent not only stayed in high places but moved up as well. The content we spent the most time on saw a 12% increase in rankings.