The helpful content system was built to identify and rank content written for users — people-first content — and to penalize content written for search engines — search-engine-first content. It is active for all languages, Persian among them, and it penalizes sites whose share of worthless, low-quality material is heavier than that of their other pages, keeping the pages it classifies out of the search results for months.
That comes on top of what was disclosed at the I/O 2023 conference: a major update to this ranking system that points toward ranking all kinds of content across a much wider level of the web.
What Google says about the upcoming HCU update
Over the years up to now, the volume of content produced on the web has grown so much that you could say it has exploded. That makes our job of organizing information harder and more challenging — like the times when, for the small and large decisions you make through search, we have to weigh many facts and viewpoints to give you a correct insight into what you are looking for.
We have taken help from generative AI so that new, innovative methods let us truly understand how you interact with search across this endless shore, so that you can reach the best of the web.
We know that many searchers, in order to find information that is useful to them, also want to hear the opinions and words of other people. In the same spirit, besides transforming web search with AI-based capabilities, we will help you find the people who inspire you when you look for answers and get their points of view. That is why we are already making updates to help you easily find and use human experiences across the web, because we want web search to be mixed with human experience.
We will bring the useful information of people you find in forums and social networks into the results.
Over the next few weeks, when you search for something that might be better answered by others’ experiences, a new section called Perspectives will appear at the top of the search results. Clicking it opens a dedicated view of the videos, images and long and short posts that people have shared in discussion forums, question-and-answer sites and social networks. We will also show more details about the producers of that content, such as their name, their photo and information about how popular they are.
People’s experiences and their interactions with one another make up the search results ahead.
Suppose you are traveling to a tourist area or a village and, well, you do not know a particular person who lives there. Just search the query “how to make friends in a new city” and Perspectives shows you a filter of viewpoints, and helps you — from wherever you are standing — reach a mass of attractions and decisions for planning your recreation or anything else. For that you get a page of results joined with people’s recommendations, such as video clips they have recorded and opinions they have shared in local forums.
You can also reach this level of content through the dedicated comments section that may appear on the results page, with the natural experiences of people in front of you. That works by clicking “see more”, which takes you to a page where you access the comment content.
The news-related Perspectives feature is now live in the TOP STORIES section, helping people get a better understanding of the news by examining others’ opinions and people’s experiential data.
We help you find content that has enough expertise and experience.
Besides helping you find credible opinions and viewpoints, we will improve the way search results are ranked with a stronger focus on specialized content that carries unique experience.
In 2022 we launched the helpful content system so that content made for people shows more than content produced only to attract clicks. So we are announcing that during the coming months we will bring a major update to HCU that understands content created from personal experience or expert viewpoint more deeply and more accurately, and that lets us rank this information in the search results.
We now know that useful information is often found on pages or in places that are unexpected for most people and hard to notice — like a good comment in a forum, a high-quality post on a lesser-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a useful subject.
The helpful content system will soon be able to find the hidden gems of the web, show them in the search results, and improve them.
We have also improved how Review content is ranked in the search results: content that reviews businesses and brands, shares a traveler’s genuine experience of a destination, or goes over how something is done. We have optimized the results with more emphasis on high quality and originality of information, so you will now see more pages ranked by first-hand experience, or by someone with deep expertise.
As we keep stressing the importance of “experience” as an element of helpful content, we continue our focus on the quality of information and on important traits such as authority, expertise and trustworthiness, so that the ranked information can be trusted.
A large part of what makes “search” so much more useful is its ability to connect you with the experience and knowledge of people all over the world. As we bring new advances to search, we help you find people’s content and viewpoints and browse among them. That new experience can be a 30-second video or an article about someone’s new diving experience at a little-known lake.
Omid Bodagh
I am an SEO specialist who likes helping businesses get seen on Google. From WordPress to SEO, whatever an online business needs to grow, I can help with it.