The Undisputed King
Content used to be the single most important thing you could do (well, that and a few backlinks). To get the full benefit, you needed to be careful how it was worded (keyword-rich, but not keyword-stuffed), how it was linked from the rest of your website, and how often it was updated. But, so long as it wasn’t obviously junk content with zero value (and even then, it was possible to get away with that), you’d always be better with that new content than without it.
In many cases, this rewarded websites that were creating great content. News websites benefited from great journalism. User-generated content sites (like Stack Overflow) benefited from content that was then curated by an interested community. All search engines worked in much the same way and sites with a lot of content often dominated the top of the search results.
The Old Pretenders
Even in the early days of SEO, some content was being created to game the system. It was so prevalent that it’s actually the subject of jokes and memes. How many times have you looked up a recipe online, only to have to scroll past what seemed like the author’s life story to get to the actual recipe?
While largely harmless, the fact that this practice was so widespread as to become the subject of jokes shows its flaws. If all you needed to get above the rest of the pack in the search results was more content, how would you fail by adding content that adds no value?
So What If It’s Irrelevant?
The issue of placing too much value on the quantity of content over its quality wasn’t just in spuriously relevant personal anecdotes added to recipes. Some companies added whole new sites under their existing ones. These often included massive quantities of new content, created with zero regard for how relevant it was to the existing website.
This wasn’t limited to companies deciding to add an encyclopedia’s worth of irrelevant content to subdomains, but any company with a blog would often find the most spurious connection to a topic to add new content.
Helpful Content Updates
Search engines started taking steps to demote irrelevant content surprisingly early. None of which really made a whole lot of difference until AI (or more specifically, LLMs) started the process of churning out content for anyone. This launched an arms race between the mass production of junk content and the search engines looking for genuinely “helpful” content.
While Google’s aptly titled Helpful Content Updates (HCU) did impact a lot of sites which were hosting hundreds, or even thousands, of pages of rubbish, they were far from foolproof. Many content creators whose content didn’t fall into Google’s idea of “helpful” were harmed, even though their content was genuinely liked by the users of their sites. Even after two explicit revisions of the HCU and face-to-face meetings between the creators and the Google teams responsible, some of these sites are still nowhere to be found in the search results.
On the flip side, some content that nobody would consider helpful was still being promoted by Google. Sites notorious for spam, clickbait, and other dross were still featuring high in the search results for highly competitive terms, and worse were a constant feature in Google’s much vaunted Discover.
So What’s New?
We’ve written about the HCU before, including how it impacted sites and how sites could recover. That’s neither new nor exciting. Content was still king, you just had to make sure that it was relevant to your website, not obviously AI-generated, and that you weren’t flooding your website with it. That’s changed again with recent Google updates.
To try to stem the flood of unhelpful content bypassing the existing functions designed to discredit it, Google’s recent updates have focused even harder on penalising these creators. Initial reactions are that Google haven’t quite mastered it yet (anecdotal reports of continued spam appearing in Discover have been common), they have successfully damaged one very specific form of content: The “why we’re the best” listicle.
The New Danger of Self-Hosted Reviews
Writing an article outlining all of your competitors’ products or services and then saying that yours are better is a time-honoured tactic to get a first page spot for searches. Listicles have become somewhat notorious for this, but they’ve remained popular because they worked. That is, until now.
Google have decided that these should be categorised with reviews, and Google have already instituted very strict rules about reviews. These rules recently got even stricter, and now hosting a review on your website, and under the new classification, includes these self-promotional listicles, means you have to meet Google’s stringent criteria for fairness.
The penalties for hosting these reviews while failing to comply with Google’s expectations for fairness can and will get your entire website penalised by Google. This has seen many sites plummet in the search results.
Help! Help! I’m Being Penalised!
So, what do you do if your website suddenly vanishes from the results? Especially after years of hard SEO work to appear at the top of the results for your valuable, relevant keywords?
As with the helpful content updates, the only solution is to remove the offending content from your website. Google hasn’t exactly changed its mind about what content is OK, but they have tightened up the rules and what their algorithm let slide previously is now considered bad practice.
Of course, Google’s ability to detect what does and doesn’t comply with the rules still isn’t 100% accurate. You may (for now) have managed to stay off Google’s radar, but there will be further updates coming. You may have been penalised for content that shouldn’t have been considered as non-compliant. Whether Google were wrong to penalise you or whether they should have penalised you but didn’t, you need to act. Remove the offending content, don’t just try to hide it, or quickly rewrite it.
Yes, you can replace the content with something similar in meaning, just make sure you’re following the new rules.
