December 2022 Google Helpful Content Update

by UTL Solar India's Best Solar Company

Google has officially confirmed the launch of the second release of the Google helpful content update/system. It started lightly on December 5th but became noticeable, according to Google, on December 6th, which is why Google did not announce it until the 6th. This update adds new signals, most notably making it work for all languages globally - it is not just looking at English content anymore.

Google posted on December 6th that on December 5th, it "released the December 2022 helpful content update, which improves our classifier and works across content globally in all languages." Google added, "the rollout may take up to two weeks to complete."

As a reminder, the Google helpful content update looks to weed out content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines that do not help or inform people. Google said this update will "tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines." The update will "help make sure that unoriginal, low-quality content doesn't rank highly in Search," Google added. So, if you are writing content to drive search engine visibility and traffic, you might be hit by this type of update, and non-English sites are no longer safe from this update.

December 2022 Google Helpful Content Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

Name: Google helpful content update

Launch Date: It began to rollout on December 5th but not so noticeable until December 6th

Rollout: It will take about two weeks to fully roll out

Targets: It looks at content that was created to rank well in search over help humans

Search Only: This currently only impacts Google Search, not Google Discover or other Google surfaces. But Google may expand this to Discover and more in the future.

Penalty: Google did not mention penalty but this update does seem to feel like a penalty for sites that will be hit by it

Sitewide: This is a sitewide algorithm, so the whole site will be impacted by this update

Not a core update: Many are going to say this is a core update, it is not.

Global and all languages: This is no longer just for English-language content, it is now all languages and global.

Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but Google did tell me it would be "meaningful." Also, Google said this will be felt more for online-educational materials, entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.

Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's advice below

Refreshes: Google updates the scores constantly here but there is a timeout period, and a validation period and it can take several months to recover from this update.

Updates to Helpful Content Update Document

Google made some small changes to its helpful content update page here are those edits:

Replaced a lot of "update" references to "system" as we expected.

Added the line "It works globally across all languages."

Remove the paragraph that it is only for English languages.

Google also updated parts of the bottom of the document, it now reads "Periodically, we refine how the classifier detects unhelpful content. When we do this in a notable way, we share this as a "helpful content update" on our Google Search ranking updates page. After such an update finish rolling out, and if the refined classifier sees that content has improved, then the unhelpful classification from our previous classifier may no longer apply.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable