How to Prepare for the Upcoming "Helpful Content Update"

Hold on to your butts

Yesterday, Google announced that they’re going to roll out a new update. The update - titled “Helpful Content Update” - is going to start rolling out next week. A lot of SEOs are understandably nervous about the implications after the disastrous May Core Update.

The update introduces a brand new site-wide ranking factor (meaning that your entire site is either going to rise or fall, not just specific pages) and is going to take 2 weeks to finish rolling out.

In this article I’m going to take a look at what Google has to say about the update and make some predictions of my own. Keep in mind that I’m making educated guesses here. I don’t have direct access to Google and have no idea what they’re planning beyond what they’ve publicly released so far.

We’ll have a lot more information in the coming weeks.

Google Search Central @googlesearchc

Next week, we will launch the “helpful content update” to better ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic. Learn more & advice creators should consider: developers.google.com/search/blog/20…

Context: TikTok is Conquering Everything

TikTok’s explosive growth in 2021 has changed everything.

We’ve seen brands like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube implement features that are designed to compete with TikTok in a desperate attempt to stem the flow of users away from their platforms (with what appears to be very little success).

TikTok isn’t only changing the social media game. The traffic flowing to TikTok makes it more popular than Google: in 2021 TikTok officially became the most popular site on the internet (a title held by Google for 15 years in a row).