As you undoubtedly know by now; the Helpful Content Update or (HCU) as it has come to be known inside the walls of our shop, is Google’s big algorithm update for 2022, and the elevator pitch for this update was “make sure to create content for users not for Search Engines.”
At first, when my SEO peers and I had heard that this update was upon us, some of the younglings around the water cooler were a little nervous, and seemingly for good reason. The word had been spreading that this update was going to be felt for weeks, months and maybe years to come akin to the likes of Penguin and Panda. The HCU made us nervous because at the end of the day, we optimize content for search engines and if you read between the lines, Google is basically saying “we don’t need you to optimize content for us, just make sure your content is helpful ‘for humans’ and we’ll do the rest.”
However, if you’ve been in SEO for many, many moons, you know that at the end of the day, Google has always held that position, yet here we are, year after year, still finding our services in high demand. At the core, my position on SEO has always been to not take short cuts, to focus on quality content. That way you deserve your rankings because you invest in the best content in your given space. If you do that you will never have to be concerned with Google Updates. At least not in the long term. In the short term however you may have a few months were the algorithm sets you back a bit.
So how did you fair after the HCU?
My client’s sites actually got hit pretty significantly after the Helpful Content Update and then even harder after the September 2022 core update. Here’s a peak at the data from one of the most dramatic impacts. You can see we get slightly impacted negatively with the HCU at the end of August and then slammed by the Core Update in Sep.
So I went deep into this for a month as any SEO will do after getting raddled by an update. I studied the data and the collective advice from the SEO community and I had a laundry list of things to bring to the client to help get us back. Then in October, as if by magic, rankings not only recovered but improved to the best we’ve every enjoyed.
So what’s the narrative here? The story is this, as an SEO team who is always putting the user first, never pursuing strategies that are designed to game the algorithm we should always expect our overall SEO philosophy of taking the long road to improvement by putting out the best content for our topics to be rewarded by Google Updates.
So if the above is true what happened in August and September? The answer to that is summed up nicely in an article written by Tom Capper titled a new way to think about core updates. In the Article, Tom brings up the old idea of the “Algorithm Refresh” this was the idea that Google can’t necessarily make the effects of an update happen in real time, but that a core update is more like all the data getting refreshed at once and so the effects seem to be happening all at once when in realty they have been happening over time but they are realized all at once.
I like the above idea however for this particular update and subsequent core update or as Top Capper would put it “data refresh”, the numbers and dates don’t quite match up.
For this one I prefer the age old SEO terminology of “settling”. This is the idea that after an update, Google uses the extreme volatility as a testing bed and after a few weeks or in this case a month, what looked like major effects in the beginning just didn’t play out in the end.
So what’s the take-away here? For me this update was a wake up call. A call to work on the Authority & Expertise of my client’s content. To build more expertise into the content we are producing and to take more credit for the expertise we already employ in our writing.