Google’s Unhelpful Content Criteria: Review Your Content!

Review your content to ensure it meets Google’s standards for helpfulness and improve your rankings.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Engagement Consultant, offered examples of unhelpful types of content. “Useless content is typically written for search engine rankings and in a way that is not human-focused,” Sullivan said.

What is Unhelpful Content?

For example, if you wrote content titled “20 fun things you can do today” and did it just for the keyword “fun things,” this might be considered unhelpful content by Google. What matters here is who you are writing the content for: For search engines or your target audience?

Tools and Score Obsession

If you use tools to determine which topics are popular when creating content, this can lead to your content being deemed useless by Google. “These types of tools cause people to focus on a ‘score’ rather than actual execution,” Sullivan added.

What comes to my mind is the scores given by tools such as Yoast SEO or SurferSEO when producing content. I observe that such scores cause our editors to focus on increasing the score rather than meeting user expectations. This leads to soulless content written solely to be successful in search engines.

Let’s admit it: we’ve all written and published this content. Now, it’s time to confront this.

How Does Google Find Out?

So, how does Google understand the purpose of a piece of content?

“If someone asks you a question and you answer it, that’s human-centered content and is likely helpful,” Sullivan says.

From this answer, I understand that The best strategy may be to answer the user questions under Other Questions in a way that helps the user and by addressing the subject from all perspectives rather than a purely score-oriented approach. In the future, this will also ensure that your site becomes a Google-recommended site when Search Generative Experience is enabled.

Conclusion

If you have been negatively affected by recent Google updates, consider that your content may have been deemed unhelpful by Google. To review your content, you can review Google’s Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content page.

Finally, Remember that the Helpful Content system focuses not only on the content but also on the placement of the content on the page. In other words, the Helpful Content system also highlights sites that offer a good user experience.

If you have flooded the top page with advertising images with the idea of ​​maximizing your advertising revenues by getting to the top in search engines, this may be one of the possible reasons you have experienced a decrease after the latest updates.