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Episode 167: Google's Helpful Content Update
1.1k Plays2 years ago
Google announced a major update to its algorithm that will hopefully help people "see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results."
Podcast Version - Find It Quickly
0:00 Intro
2:32 Google's helpful content update
2:37 Biggest update since Google's Penguin Update
3:45 Google's panda Update
3:53 Google's interstitial (pop-up) Update
4:56 Have you been affected by the updates?
5:08 Organic search
5:20 Google Analytics or search console
5:54 Google's helpful content update: focusing on people-first content
8:09 Jasper.ai
8:48 G2
10:06 Google wants to focus on people-first content
13:23 Remove content that isn't people-first content
13:57 This will be a site wide update, not just pages
14:36 How can you check for red flags on your website?
15:25 Won't know ramifications until after the fact
17:18 Action Step: Add our site to Google analytics or verify with google search console
17:40 Action Step: Consider removing "grey or black hat" strategies from your site
17:55 Action Step: Avoid focusing on search engine-first content
20:23 Past updates to digital marketing world
Show notes and additional resources https://daveyandkrista.com/google-helpful-content-update/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Brands at Book Show
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
Implications of Google's New Update
00:00:15
Speaker
the next major Google update is here. And in this episode, we're diving into what you need to know about Google's helpful content update, what it is, what this means for business owners and website owners, and what if any actions need to be taken right now and more. If you follow SEO news, you've probably seen that many are comparing this update to Google's Penguin update,
00:00:36
Speaker
which was a major update around 10 years ago now. Hard to believe that it was that long ago. I think that the reason that this update is turning so many heads is that it's one that could ding your entire website and not just pages on your website. We dive more into what that means in this episode.
Resources and Feedback Channels
00:00:55
Speaker
As always, be sure to check out the show notes at DavyandChrista.com for the resources that we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brans That Book podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram, at DavyandChrista. Now, on to the episode.
Technical Mishaps and Behind the Scenes
00:01:16
Speaker
All right, looks like we're actually recording this time. So shout out to Jesse, co-founder over at Till. We actually recorded this episode together. And then of course I deleted it. Usually it saves a separate track if I go, you came live, but I deleted it off of Facebook and then realized that was my only copy of it. Oh, I know. I mean, after all these years still technical glitches, but it makes me feel better that some of the podcasts that I listen to, they talk about their technical glitches and they have like professional people who like do this for them.
00:01:46
Speaker
Sure, but for the record, that's like the first time that's ever happened. Fortunately, Jesse, I don't know. He did beat me and said there was a Catan recently.
Deep Dive into Google's Content Update
00:01:55
Speaker
That could have been it. I don't know. But point being, take two. It's always better the second time around anyways. I'm going to have a blog post that goes with this episode as well. People are always very interested in Google updates.
00:02:06
Speaker
Oh, so this is the second time for you, first time for me. Yes, yes. So I am not very familiar with this Google updates topic. So I will be asking all the questions. Exactly. Well, that's, that's perfect then. Right. Yeah. And we just have to put work. We're leaving for vacation next week. Very excited for that. And so it's a busy week. Yeah. So there's lots, you know, kind of lots. It's crunch time.
00:02:26
Speaker
It is. Yeah. Anyways, let's talk about Google's helpful content update. That's what it's being called. It's being hailed as the biggest update since the Google penguin update. Nobody knows what penguin is. I didn't even know it until this morning when you sent me our outline for today.
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah, well, okay, so the Penguin Update was a penalty for people who were basically building a bunch of spammy, gray hat, usually black hat, backlinks to their website. I do remember those pages. Like you would search for something years ago and you would get like one of those white web pages with just a ton of blue links on it and they would link and sometimes people would pay for them, right? I don't even... Well, yeah, that was the idea. I thought people could pay to have their website listed on these pages so you'd have like weddingphotographers.com and you'd pay to be there, right?
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't remember. See, I don't have as good of a memory of what this actually looked like circa 2010, you know? I can't remember. But that's the basic idea is that people would be paying for backlinks or building basically artificial backlinks that pointed to their website. They also did sketchy things like make font sites one on their web browsers or like use like white, white on white text. So you couldn't see all of the links to all these different things on these pages. So sketchy, but Google's smart. And apparently that's what Penguin was. I didn't know that that had a specific name.
00:03:41
Speaker
Yup. So for a while they were on with the P name, so penguin and panda update. I was going to say why penguin? Does this like links have anything to do with penguins? You know, honestly, I can't remember, you know, they've gotten away from that. Obviously this one's Google's helpful content update. There was the interstitial update a few years ago that people were losing their minds about. The what? So popups, that's what interstitial is, a modal update. Interstitial? Yeah. Nobody knows what that means. You sound so nerdy right now. Let's back up a little bit. Did Jesse berate you when you did this with him?
00:04:09
Speaker
No, because Jesse's bigger nerd than I am. But anyways, point being is that Google has rolled out with major updates in the past, and people have lost their minds about those major updates in the past.
Understanding People-First Content
00:04:19
Speaker
You may remember these updates, you may not remember these updates. If you don't remember these updates, it's probably because you weren't hit with negative consequences of these updates. I mean, you didn't have a website back then. Yeah, exactly, whatever it might be. But the point being is I say that because people are making a big deal of this update.
00:04:34
Speaker
Google released a blog post about this update last week. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to that into the show notes. So if you want to see what Google themselves has to say about this update, head on over to the show notes and you can find a link there also linked to a Google's update page. So as they roll this out, or when they're done rolling this out, they will update that page as well. And then of course you can check and see whether you've been hit by this update in Google analytics or in Google search console primarily.
00:05:02
Speaker
And how would you see a drop in your- Yeah, you would see a drop, especially if you have a lot of search visibility- In your organic search. Yeah, in your organic search, in how you currently rank for your organic search, right? Or you could see a big boost as well.
00:05:18
Speaker
And if you don't have Google Analytics on your site, now is a good time to add them. Well, Google Search Console is really the place that you want to go first. All right, so that's what you want to have set up. But it kind of reminds me of the Google Panda update. That was a low-quality content update. There's some differences, though, that we'll get into. But basically, what I want to cover real quickly is what is a Google Helpful Content Update, what this means for business owners, website owners, whether people need to be worried or not, and what sorts of actions people may need to take right now. Cool. So where should we dive in?
00:05:47
Speaker
How about you just find what helpful content is? All right. Cool. So this is basically as Google puts it is focusing on people first content. All right. So one thing that they're not describing it as is a penalty. Okay. So they're not describing this as a penalty. It feels maybe a little disingenuous not to call it a penalty, right? If your site is negatively impacted by this. So is it kind of like you don't get positive results if you don't do this, but they're just not saying that they're negative.
00:06:15
Speaker
I feel like it's, if we went to Jack and we are like, he got in trouble and we were like, it's not a punishment, Jack. It's a consequence, right? This is Google telling us the same thing. It's not a punishment, guys. It's a consequence. Okay. So basically this is an algorithm update. So they're looking at a bunch of different signals to determine what helpful content is and what it's not. And what they want to do is a better job of ranking content that's made for people first. Okay.
00:06:44
Speaker
So like blog posts or can you define what helpful content is? Well, they are. We're going to get into some questions that Google asks to help you explore whether you have helpful content on your website. Cause I think everybody's probably like, Oh my gosh, what if I don't blog? Like, Oh, I actually have helpful content on my website. Like.
00:07:00
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. I think it's not so much like, Oh, if you don't blog right now, you don't have helpful content on your website. Helpful content on a website ultimately satisfies searcher intent. All right. So when somebody lands on your website, thinking that they're going to find certain information, do they find that information? Is it written for them or is it written to game search engines for the click? Right. That's what Google's trying to weed out. And so for a lot of us, you know, if we're focusing on creating actual useful content for people that answers people's questions, that serves people,
00:07:30
Speaker
We probably don't have much to worry about. But there are a couple, I think, new trends, especially in the search engine optimization world, like using artificial intelligence software to write blog posts for you. So now you can churn out, you know, so much more content. Everybody who does not like blogging is now thinking like, why did I not know that existed? Yeah, right.
00:07:51
Speaker
Well, and the thing is, is that I still don't quite understand how Google's going to... Because there's a way to use those tools where maybe you use it to start the post for you, but then you go through as a human editor and copy edit. I mean, is it any good? I've never seen this done. Yeah, actually. So one of the more popular ones is called Jasper. I think it's called jasper.ai. All right, for anybody who wants to check it out. But we're not recommending this, right? I'm not recommending it right now, only because I have very limited experience with it. Because it sounded like you're saying that Google is going to weed these things out.
00:08:20
Speaker
Well, I think what Google is trying to get at are those sites, those especially content, think content sites that churn out a lot of content that's designed to rank and get clicks and get, you know, and because they get traffic, that's how they monetize. Maybe they run ads or whatever, but it's not helpful to people. Okay. One of the sites that comes to mind, and I don't know if anybody else has had this experience, but I talked about it with Jesse is a G2.
00:08:47
Speaker
Okay, so I didn't know what this was until you showed it to me earlier today. And I've definitely seen this before where it's like, you look for something, it gives you like a one paragraph answer that doesn't really answer your question. And then it feels like there's maybe affiliate links on the bottom or something. So we were trying to explain this, or I was trying to explain this to our intern earlier. And so I did an example search. I did something like ConvertKit Alternatives, right? And whenever you type in something like that tech and alternative, this site shows up and it just lists a bunch of like, not even that related tech.
00:09:16
Speaker
And so it's obviously a content website that I think is built more for a search engine optimization perspective than to actually help people solve an issue, right? Which in that case would be try to find an alternative to a certain piece of software, you know? So I think one of the other examples, I don't know if I read this in the Google blog post or in another post about this, but think about in, you know, you just finished watching the latest season of Yellowstone or Ted Lasso or something like that. Can you tell what Davey's favorite shows are?
00:09:43
Speaker
And then you go and you search for when the next season's gonna be released. You know there's blog posts that are like, season five release date, you know, but they actually don't have the release date. They don't say it yet. It feels like they're computer generated. There's not really an answer. And I don't even know if they're computer generated, but they're written for that traffic, you know? And you can debate amongst yourselves as to whether that's okay or not. But the point being is that Google wants to focus on people first content.
Criteria for Evaluating Content
00:10:09
Speaker
All right, so they give you a few questions to answer to determine whether you are writing people first content. These are some of the questions that they give you and they say answering yes to the questions below means you're probably on the right track with a people first approach. Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
00:10:28
Speaker
Does your content clearly demonstrate firsthand experience and depth of knowledge? For example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service or visiting a place. I think this is a big one too. Like let's say you create a tech content site and you're just churning out reviews of products that you've never used. You've never really talked to anybody who's used them and it's just for search engines, right?
00:10:50
Speaker
or for affiliate link clicks, right? Like linking to the product on Amazon to get that click. Yeah, and the reason people do that, right, is because they're generating revenue somehow, right? So I think those are the sites that have to worry about it. Here are some of the other questions. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus? I mean, and this just goes back to good SEO, right? Like if you are an email marketing expert,
00:11:11
Speaker
And, you know, I mean, your blog should be full of different email marketing content. And the fact that you have written about different aspects of email marketing, maybe you've compared different tools that you've used and made recommendations, all those show that, you know, you have a primary focus and you have authority in that area. Right. So
00:11:30
Speaker
I do feel like hearing all this though, it makes me just, I feel like it reinforces the fact that blogging is still really important because I think it's going to be hard to answer all of these questions and answer search intent with like a four or five page website, especially if there's not a lot of copy on your website.
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it just depends though. I would say that it's not, I think blogging is good and important and content creation in general, we talk a lot about that. I don't think if you don't have a blog that you should be worried about this as long as the pages on your website have good content on them. I'm thinking of the sites that, I've seen many sites that maybe don't have a lot of content on those pages.
00:12:05
Speaker
Sure. I think in general though, that if you have four or five page website and you don't have a lot of content on each of those pages, you're probably struggling to rank just in general, you know, so that you don't necessarily have to worry about this update per se. You have to worry about just doing SEO in general, you know, and that involves creating good, helpful content, you know.
00:12:26
Speaker
Some of these other questions real quick, might as well go through the last three. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal? Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience? Are you keeping in mind guidance for core updates and product reviews? And these are linked back to other updates from Google.
00:12:44
Speaker
So how do they figure out whether you're doing such things? They're going to use a number of different signals, including signals like the average amount of time that somebody spends on your website, how many pages they visit, do they take any actions on your website? Those are all going to be important things when it comes to answering these questions well.
00:13:02
Speaker
I think in general though, if you are creating content, if you're actually, you have maybe a copywriter or you're creating content yourself and you're writing for people answering their questions, you probably don't have a ton to worry about.
00:13:15
Speaker
That's good news. Yeah. Now here's why this update I think is stressing so many people out. All right. I think it has less to do with the update itself. Although I'm sure there's some people out there worried about that content. Like if you feel like you've created content like that on your website, it's probably best to go and remove that content ASAP. You know, like if I was running a content website and I created a bunch of AI generated articles that I didn't really copy edit all that well, I'd probably go and remove those from my site.
00:13:41
Speaker
To help many people listening to us have done that. Yeah, exactly. If you listen to this podcast, you know that we have just straight up, we've always been talking about creating useful content. But anyways, point being is that this update is a site-wide, it's something that's going to affect your site site-wide. It's not going to affect pages on your website.
00:14:04
Speaker
So that means if you get in trouble. Remember, it's not a penalty. It's not a punishment. It's a consequence, Krista. If you get a consequence on one page, like let's say you have a blog post that gets a consequence, instead of just affecting that page, it affects the whole site now. Exactly. So if Google deems that your site doesn't have enough helpful content on it and they haven't released what percentage that is or whatever, your whole site will be not penalized, but will suffer the negative consequences of not showing up high in the site.
00:14:34
Speaker
So you know how we use tools like SEMrush to check for certain search components on a website? And it can tell us if there are red flags. Are there any tools out there yet that will tell you if somebody's gonna red flag on this or is it just so new that nothing has been developed yet?
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah. That's the hard part about this is so kind of the gist of what we know about this, right? Is that it's Google's helpful content update. This update is being rolled out starting this week and should last, you know, they say about two weeks. The rollout should, should take place over the next two weeks. And they give you some guidelines for figuring out whether you are indeed creating people first content.
00:15:13
Speaker
And those are the questions you've read, right? Yeah. They also give you some questions to answer to avoid creating content for search engines first. So I can go over those in a second, but at the end of the day, we're not going to know the ramifications of this update as with pretty much any other Google update until after the fact, you know, it'll be interesting while we're on vacation next week or the week after when we get back, coming back on, checking Google search console, figuring out, hide your computer so that I don't see you like checking them.
00:15:40
Speaker
I don't know if we're going to have good internet where we go. It's going to be curious, right? I mean, I think it's a big opportunity for a lot of people. Like if you've been creating helpful content for people, like you write in depth blog posts, you know, whatever that looks like for you, this could be a real opportunity for you. Cause there might be people that have always worked or large content sites have always ranked above you having created just, you know, that search engine, thin content stuff, you know? And so this could be opportunity for, you know, like,
00:16:08
Speaker
real people with real content to have a lot more search visibility in Google. So I think for a lot of us who are running small teams that are doing things on the up and up, this could be an opportunity. That's how I'm focusing on it. Now, there is always that nervousness that it is a site-wide update and it's not a page update. So if our website happens to be hit by this in some way,
00:16:31
Speaker
I'm not really worried because so many of your blog posts are like 3,000 words of copy. And pretty much every one of them, we're writing from personal experience. So I'm not too worried about that either, but you just never know. Because a lot of what Google's doing, it's a machine learning, it's artificial intelligence on its own. So what happens if we set off some sort of alarm? I feel like I trust Google more than like Instagram.
00:16:53
Speaker
Sure. Again, I'm not super worried. And I don't think people doing things, you know, quote unquote, the right way should be worried either. I think that this is going to be like a lot of other updates that you hear about where there's going to be a lot of especially SEOs out there losing their minds about this. But come next month, you'll have to be reminded that this happened.
00:17:12
Speaker
Hopefully. So action steps for people for the next weeks, maybe consider they add their site to Google search console. Yeah, they verify their site with Google search console. So that's really, I mean, at this point, I think for most of us, it's just monitoring what's happening. I mean, it's like, it's probably even to a certain extent too late to take a lot of specific action here, but you'd be able to see like what it is today and if it goes down in the next two weeks. Sure. But I'm just talking about from like a content perspective.
00:17:38
Speaker
But if you have, if you've been deploying gray hat, black hat type SEO strategies, now's the time maybe to consider removing those or unpublishing those from your site. That's what I would do. Again, fortunately, something that we don't have to worry about. I do want to go through these questions about avoiding creating content for search engines first because I do think they're helpful.
00:18:00
Speaker
Is this content primarily to attract people from search engines rather than made for humans? Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search? I think again, there's a lot of content sites out there that don't have a real niche, but they create so much content over such a span of content and that's the play, right? Because they're hoping that a percentage of that will drive a lot of traffic and again, they can monetize on ads and affiliate links and things like that.
00:18:25
Speaker
that they might be blogging about tech and wedding bouquets and dogs for me. Yeah, exactly. Isn't that funny? We both thought of dogs at the same time. Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise? Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information? Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? That's funny.
00:18:49
Speaker
I do feel like most of us have that like 300 number. It's because of Yoast, because Yoast forever. And maybe still now, like have you written at least 300 words? Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise? Again, this is big in the content site world, right? Where content sites can be sold for a lot of money, you know? And so people would create these content sites in these different niches where they have no expertise, but they know how to play the game.
00:19:17
Speaker
So this is Google cracking down on that. Oh, and here's where I got the TV show one. Does your content promise to answer a question that actually no one has the answer to, such as suggesting there's a release date for a product movie or TV show when one isn't confirmed?
00:19:31
Speaker
It's so funny. There's so many of those. So I've been like, when does the chosen come out? And like, I've definitely seen that exact thing on a website. I feel like you need to add that like most people, like if you're a wedding photographer sharing your weddings that you've worked on and helpful tips and advice, like none of these questions probably apply to you. I think that the people who are going to get hit are people who are really trying to game the system.
00:19:52
Speaker
Exactly. And I am going to post to the Google ranking updates page. So they are going to post when it begins and when it's fully rolled out, which they said could take up to two weeks. So anyways, we hope that that's helpful. Honestly, I think a lot of people are kind of sitting around some nervously, some not.
00:20:10
Speaker
Maybe the nerds are sitting around waiting. I'm just curious. Honestly, you know, like we said, you know, I'm not so much worried about our site. Although, you know, I think anytime there's an update, it's like with the Jesse and I were to had a real interesting conversation about, you know, what we feel like the biggest shakeup to the digital marketing world has ever been, you know, just in terms of updates. I'm just curious. What did you say?
00:20:32
Speaker
Well, Jesse thought just the rollout of the platform like Facebook ads, you know, basically how it was different than, you know, Google PPC has been around for longer, but Facebook really, I think changed the digital advertising landscape. And we both agreed that a close second to that was the iOS 14 update, you know, around privacy that rolled out that made tracking people across the web so much more difficult, you know, but as far as Google updates that, you know, come to
Digital Marketing Changes and Challenges
00:21:01
Speaker
mind,
00:21:01
Speaker
I mean, again, I think maybe it's because we've always just focused on creating for people first, you know, like to me keyword research is like a secondary thing. Like I have an idea because I've been asked a question a million times and so I'm gonna go write that post, but then I go do keyword research to see, you know, what the variations of keywords are and things like that, you know.
00:21:22
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I just feel like every time there's a Google update, there's gonna be a lot of stress and anxiety about it. I think for most of us, if we're focusing on the right things, you know, again, there's nothing in this update. I think that like changes really any of the advice that we've been giving about SEO over the last five years. No, I mean, I think it just enforces it all. I wouldn't find it surprising. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for re-recording this episode with me. Jesse, I am so sorry.
00:21:51
Speaker
We will record maybe a part two of this update or in a future episode, we'll at least share what we've learned about it. And hopefully our site and everybody we talk to is like, oh yeah, this was a huge opportunity. We'll see. Yeah. Say a prayer for Davey on a vacation, then it doesn't stress him out too much. Oh, it's like, I'm not stressed about it. I think for me, it's a matter of like, okay, I'm disconnecting during vacation. Good. We'll see. Thanks for joining us guys.
00:22:22
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.