Google has once again provided us with more updates over the past few months, including updates in September and August. These updates are the latest in a series of changes that Google makes each year to improve search results for the end user and provide us with more relevant, up-to-date content.

On September 14th, 2023, Google launched the Helpful Content Update, which contains two changes that are implemented to change how a website ranks in Google search results. It appears with this new update that Google has given a clear stance on how it will treat AI-generated content.

The other newsworthy considerations are related to how third-party content is treated when it is hosted on a subdomain or as a main part of any website. We have also seen new warnings in regard to how Google treats sites that try to fake page updates and fake the publishing date which the content was written on. Site owners are given a chance to correct course, and a Google employee named Gary Illyes offered up some insight into how the Helpful Content Update takes a look at sitewide signals to determine the quality of your existing content.

This content update is expected to have a large impact on the industry and how content is ranked and created in the future. This update will likely take 2 weeks to finish rolling out, so you must have some patience and ignore the early data and ranking fluctuations and instead focus on long-term value by reading the latest Google guidelines.

Google has also provided more detail on what to do if your site has lost traffic or rankings after a Helpful Content update; this will help to give business owners or website owners a template of what to fix ahead of the next update and give them some advice on how to build out quality content that Google will promote for the foreseeable future.

This latest update has one goal in mind, which is to help promote sites that have quality content that is both well written and useful for the end user, while also ensuring that low-quality, unoriginal content does not reach the first page of search results. In the long run, this will help search engine users find what they need quickly. This update runs alongside the core algorithm and looks for certain signals over the database of content of a site so that it can be labelled as a good source of information.

The latest statement from Google regarding content is that the quality content should be written by humans, for humans. Now they have reworded that statement, which appears to make industry insiders think that Google is considering how it will treat AI-generated content that is uploaded to the web. It will perhaps still value this content, but the debate still seems to be ongoing about the value of content that is generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes in this update is the treatment of third-party content on a subdomain. Many affiliate marketing companies or other companies recognise that leveraging the power of an existing domain could be used as a shortcut to get better and faster SEO results. It appears with this update Google has cracked down on that loophole.

We can see from this update that sites might be negatively impacted by hosting content from other companies under their official domain name. This may have come about due to the fact that this method has been abused so many times, but it also represents an issue for Google since they trust the main domain name, but a subdomain may contain all kinds of spam content or even have pages that may have been created by hackers for a quick profit.

Google has published advice that the latest Helpful Content update measures site-wide signals to determine quality, so any content that is hosted on subdomains will be included as part of the rating system. This may result in your overall content score being lowered. The advice from Google remains that if content is created and does not align with the site’s original purpose and does not align with the goals of the website or is produced without the involvement of the primary site, then it should be blocked from being indexed by Google in order to increase your site’s credibility.

Google has also made some updates in terms of the guidance it offers to site owners and content creators. This is mainly regarding sites that update a page and give it a new published date when in reality the content itself has not been updated or offering anything fresh. This is seen as a warning sign to others that may be using this to fake a freshness signal and get a short-term boost by doing so.

Gary Illyes offered up some insight into the types of signals that Google analyses during the scan of site content. He said that some signals are at a URL level, others are scanning for patterns, others are host level, and others are domain level, so what we learned from this is that this problem has multiple sides; they scan a wide range of signals and boil it down to an overall site score.

A new update to the official Google document regarding how best to create content for your website was also added. The updated advice states that if you suspect you may have been hit by the update, then the best thing to do is read over the published guidelines and assess your content in line with those guidelines. You should then fix or remove any content that you deem to be unhelpful, and this should improve your overall content quality.

The second update took place on August 22nd, 2023; this was a Google core update that will have a large impact on many search engine results pages. This update appears to be aimed at content relevance, and the best method for recovery is to focus on continual improvement of your content over a long time span.

Google has stated that no core updates are designed to target individual sites, but rather sites are rewarded or punished based on what signals Google deems valuable to search engine users at the time. Remember that Google is always changing the game and working on becoming a much better search engine by digging deeper into what constitutes a high-value website and what can be marked as low value.

Google has stated that if your website has been impacted by this update, then the best process to correct it is to take a look at pages that aren’t performing very well and compare your content to the guidelines Google provides under its help page for delivering quality content. You should then use this template and compare your content to see how it could be improved.

It can take several months for pages or sites to recover from lost rankings, so the best bet is to focus on improving your value in the long term and making the right moves from the start of your site rather than being reactive to every update. Google may launch minor updates between a core update, so you may see some minor scale rebounds if you make positive changes to your website. In other words, focus on delivering value with your website instead of making quick fixes.

Based on these 2 updates from Google, we can see a shift towards rewarding higher quality content that users want to see and is actually helpful for them when it comes to making buying decisions or becoming educated about a topic. We also see that these updates are becoming more sitewide, which means that your overall site score is important rather than just a few pages.

We can see that the advice from Google remains the same, which is to read over their content guidelines and ask yourself some honest questions and apply the criteria to your own content to see if you are putting out high-quality content or just creating pages of low-quality content that is not valuable. We can also see that the overall trust of your site can be impacted when it comes to uploading unrelated content under a subdomain. We also see that focusing on the long term rather than a quick-fix solution is the most recommended path.

Perhaps the biggest talking point from these updates will be how Google handles content that is created by AI (Artificial Intelligence); this represents one of the biggest industry changes to date and will likely change the way content creators operate or come up with ideas for content. Google so far has changed its official stance, which appears to now show that they understand some content will be generated by AI, and they will likely accept that this new standard will require a whole different set of rules in order to determine its value to the web.