Google Search is always trying to better connect people to useful information. To that end, we've launched what we call the "Useful Content Update," which is part of a broader effort to ensure that people see more original, useful content written by people, for people, in search results. Here's more information about this update and what developers should consider.
Focus on user-friendly content
Updating useful content aims to better reward content where visitors feel satisfied with their experience, while content that does not meet visitor expectations will not perform well.
How can you create content that succeeds with our new update? By following our old advice and guidelines to create content for people, not search engines. People-first content creators focus on creating satisfying content first, while also using SEO best practices to provide more value to searchers. Answering yes to the following questions 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 who would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
▪️Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from actually using a product or service or visiting a location)?
▪️Does your site have a primary goal or focus?
▪️After reading your content, does someone feel like they learned enough about a topic to help them achieve their goal?
▪️Does someone reading your content feel like they had a satisfying experience?
▪️Do you consider our tips for major updates and product reviews?
Avoid creating content for search engines first
Our recommendation for a user-first approach does not invalidate following SEO best practices, such as those outlined in Google's own SEO guide. SEO is useful when applied to content that users prioritize. However, content created primarily for search engine traffic is highly correlated with content that searchers find unsatisfactory.
How do you avoid the user prioritization approach? Answering yes to some or all of these questions is a warning sign that you should reevaluate how you create content on your site:
▪️ Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, not humans?
▪️Do you produce a lot of content on various topics in the hope that some of them will perform well in search results?
▪️Do you use extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
▪️Do you mainly summarize what others have said without adding much value?
▪️ Do you write about things just because they seem popular and not because you're otherwise writing about them for your current audience?
▪️Does your content make readers feel like they need to search again for better information from other sources?
▪️Do you write in a certain word count because you've heard or read That Google has a preferred number of words? (No, we don't).
▪️Did you decide to jump into a certain subject area with no real expertise, but mainly because you thought you would get search traffic?
▪️Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting a release date for a product, movie, or TV show that has yet to be confirmed?
How the update works
This update will start next week. We will post on the Google Ranking Updates page when it starts and when it will be fully rolled out, which may take up to two weeks. This update introduces a new site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals for ranking web pages. Our systems automatically identify content that appears to be of little value, adds little value, or is not particularly useful to those searching.
Any content—not just junk content—on sites that have been found to have relatively high amounts of junk content in general is less likely to perform well in search, assuming there's other content elsewhere on the web that's better displayed. For this reason, removing unhelpful content can help your other content rank.
A natural question that some will have is how long will it take for a site to perform better if it removes unhelpful content? Sites detected by this update may notice that this signal has been applied to them over a period of several months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly launched sites and existing sites. Since it detects that non-useful content has not returned in the long run, the classification will no longer be applied.
This classification process is fully automated and uses a machine learning model. This is not a manual action or a spam action. Instead, it's just a new signal and one of many that Google evaluates to rank content.
This means that some user-friendly content on sites classified as non-useful content can still rank well if there are other signals that identify that user-friendly content as useful and relevant to a search term. This signal is also weighted; Sites with a lot of unhelpful content may notice a stronger impact. In any case, for best success, make sure you remove unhelpful content and also follow all our guidelines.
This update will initially affect English searches globally, and we plan to expand it to other languages in the future. In the coming months, we'll also continue to refine the way the classifier detects unhelpful content, and begin further efforts to better reward user-centric content.
Thanks to everyone who submitted feedback. We received enough reports for this particular update that the feedback form is now closed, however we have included the link in the blog post for more date accuracy.
If you have feedback about this update, you can comment on this thread in our Help forum. If you'd like to give us specific feedback about your site, you can use the feedback form for this update. We use your feedback to help our engineers find ways to improve our systems overall.