What creators should know about Google's helpful content update

Google preannounces the "helpful content update" and what to focus on with your content in this blog post. Yep, it was preannounced, meaning what exactly? I interpret it as being a major update, so they want people prepared for it.

They break it down into 3 sections:

1. Focus on people-first content
2. Avoid creating content for search engines first
3. How the update works

I have oh so many thoughts about this blog post and the upcoming update, but the overarching theme that I see Google asking when it comes to assessing a site is: Is there topical authority here and does the content help people?

How they plan to address that...we'll see next week!

I also think another sign that this is a significant update is that there are so many blog posts about this update almost immediately after Google's announcement on Twitter. It looks like many of the top SEOs already knew about the update and there was a press embargo until the announcement. Some authors also said they "spoke with the Google team about the Helpful Content Update."

There's no shortage of predictions and hypotheses out there. Here is what some of the top SEOs are saying:

• Wil Reynolds
• Lily Ray
• Glenn Gabe
• Marie Haynes
• FATJOE
• Barry Schwartz
• Authority Hackers (video)

google.com  

More content by people, for people in Search

While everyone talks about the helpful content update, Danny Sullivan releases a blog post the same days as the update announcement. He talkes about helping searchers find helpful, authentic information.

At the end of the post, he discusses product reviews and the series of updates last year. Then he says "...in the coming weeks, we'll roll out another update to make it even easier to find high-quality, original reviews."

Barry Schwartz seems to be one of the few that has also noticed this. He seems to think it's being released the week of August 29th in his article.

blog.google  

How Google Uses Anchors in Ranking Search Results

JC Chouinard takes a look at a Google patent covering how anchors are used in ranking search results. He describes the patent and some of the key aspects:

"If a web page (A) links to another web page (B), and that linked web page (B) is also relevant to the query (Q) for which the linking page (A) ranks, then behaviour data for the linking page (A) will be passed on the linked page (B)."

• Behaviour data can impact not only a search result, but pages that it links to.
• Links on page that do not rank, nor have behaviour data for a given query are not impacted by this patent.
• Links with negative anchor text about a page may be excluded (e.g. containing text like “bad”, “terrible”, “horrible”, etc.). This feature may only be done for specific categories of queries such as travel and products.

jcchouinard.com