It’s important to stay updated with changes in the Google search algorithm. Changes can drastically affect your ranking positions.
Here’s a useful list of algorithm updates, including links to the tweets where you can find more information about each update.
December 2022 Link Spam Update
This update was designed to improve the detection of unnatural links and neutralize any credit passed by them. Sites with spammy links pointing to them as well as sites linking out to other sites in an unnatural way can be affected. This update affects all the languages.
December 2022 Helpful Content
The second helpful content update enhances the helpful content system introduced by Google in August. It expands to all languages, and can introduce new ranking signals or adjust existing ones.
October 2022 Link Spam Update
The update was designed to improve Google’s automated systems’ ability to detect spam and catch new types of spam.
September 2022 Product Review Update
Update to ensure people see product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.
August 2022 Helpful Content Update
Massive update that heavily rewards people-first content.
The Helpful Content system is explained below in this article.
Google Helpful Content System
Google’s ranking system uses a signal to show helpful, original content in search results. The Helpful Content system is designed to ensure content is written by people, for people.
The system generates a site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals for ranking web pages.
Our systems automatically identify content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to those doing searches.
How does the helpful content system work?
The helpful content system operates by rewarding content that people find valuable and satisfying. Content that fails to meet visitors’ expectations will not perform well.
If you believe your website could be affected by this update, you should take the following actions:
- Get rid of unhelpful content from your site
- Eliminate low quality content from your site
- Remove content with low value, such as articles with fewer than 400 words for example
The signal is weighted, meaning that content considered unhelpful from a site that already contains a significant amount of unhelpful content will have a stronger negative impact.
Your content should be created for other people to read. Sure, you can optimize for search engines but the intention should be to help other people, not to rank highly in Google.
Read more from Google on how to create this type of content: Creating Helpful Content
How long will it take for the site to improve after unhelpful content is removed?
After removing unhelpful content from your site, it may take several months for the site-wide signal of unhelpful content to be completely removed. Once the system no longer detects any unhelpful content, and there have been no new additions of unhelpful content for a while, the signal will be removed.
Google periodically updates its system, and with these updates, the unhelpful content signal may eventually no longer be applied to your site.
How Google detects Spam
Google tries to detect spam content and links. If your site is found with this kind of content expect your site to be impacted.
Check out Google’s spam policy here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies
Some things you should not do if you don’t want to get penalized by Google:
- Cloaking
- Presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users
- Examples: showing a page about travel destinations to search engines while showing a page about discount drugs to users, inserting text or keywords into a page only when the user agent that is requesting the page is a search engine
- Doorways
- Sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries that lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination
- Examples: multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page, multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of a site(s), substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
- Hacked content
- Any content placed on a site without permission, due to vulnerabilities in a site’s security
- Examples: code injection, page injection, content injection, redirects
- Hidden text and links
- Placing content on a page in a way solely to manipulate search engines and not to be easily viewable by human visitors
- Examples: using white text on a white background, hiding text behind an image, using CSS to position text off-screen, setting the font size or opacity to 0, hiding a link by only linking one small character
- Sneaky redirects
- Redirecting users to a different page than the one they intended to visit
- Examples: redirecting users to a page with a different language or country, redirecting users to a page with malware
- Spamming
- Using techniques or tactics that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to try to improve a site’s ranking in Google Search results
- Examples: keyword stuffing, link schemes, cloaking, scraping content from other websites and republishing it, creating pages with little
- Thin affiliate pages: pages with copied product descriptions and reviews from original merchants without added value
- User-generated spam: spammy content added to a site by users through channels intended for user content
- Spammy accounts on hosting services
- Spammy posts on forum threads
- Comment spam on blogs
- Spammy files uploaded to file hosting platforms
Other reasons for demotion or removal from Google’s index are:
- Legal removals: High volume of valid copyright removal requests can result in demotion of other content from the site in search results
- Personal information removals: High volume of personal information removals involving a site with exploitative removal practices can result in demotion of other content from the site in search results
- Policy circumvention: Actions intended to bypass spam or content policies for Google Search can result in restriction or removal of eligibility for search features
- Scam and fraud: Automated systems seek to identify pages with scammy or fraudulent content and prevent them from showing up in search results
Final Thoughts
Google frequently updates its search algorithm and these updates can have a big impact on your site. Stay informed of changes and updates so your website keeps providing content that ranks well with Google.
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