The Search for Quality Content
Recently, we posted a blog about how content was still king, but that if you wanted to succeed, then you needed to make sure that content was good quality. While this may have been taken as, “Don’t get AI to write your blogs,” it was a little more nuanced. Using AI in your writing is fine, but the output has to be good quality.
People who believe AI is universally both evil and incompetent would say that AI can’t generate good quality content, but the fact is that’s not entirely true. AI driven by someone who knows the subject can (can, not will) deliver quality content that is objectively better than human written content from someone who doesn’t understand what they’re writing about.
Content is still a good SEO strategy, in fact, if you get it right, it’s golden. But what you say and how you say it are vital. With two Core Updates and a Spam Update coming in the space of less than two months, there’s a good chance that you are seeing your organic traffic dropping recently. If so, it’s helpful to know what has happened and what you can do to remedy the situation.
Helpful Content and Quality Ratings
Before we look at the current situation, we should look at what Google did previously. Having long told people that they needed good quality content to appear in search results (when for a long time, that wasn’t actually the case at all), Google introduced quality raters. These were actual people whose job it was to look at pages appearing in the search results and make sure their content was absolute rubbish.
This was fine as far as it went, but there was no way it could go far enough. There is just too much content on the internet to make human checking a viable or affordable strategy. So, Google looked to algorithmically detect bad content. Back in 2011, they released the Panda Update, which sought to penalise the low effort content which was rife precisely because, up until that point, it was a winning strategy to produce thin, spammy content en masse to game Google’s algorithm.
While Panda was largely successful, it wasn’t foolproof, and spam still got through, it just had to avoid Panda’s criteria for what was spam. So, Google eventually (in 2022) released the first Helpful Content update, which ironically penalised not only content Google deemed unhelpful, but also screwed over hundreds of websites which people actually liked. Google have since admitted (eventually) that the HCU might have been a bit overzealous, but that they don’t care enough to compensate affected websites or roll the change back.
Automating the Rating
With human beings being too inefficient to rate the quality of all the new content finding its way into Google’s index and algorithmic spam filtering being too heavy-handed and inaccurate, Google finally seemed to hit on a solution. Using AI, Google finally had a way to apply their helpful content and quality guidelines at a sufficient scale to really clean the dross out of the index. Ironically, the very tools being used to produce massive quantities of spam to try to rig the SEO environment were now being stymied by that same technology.
This negatively impacted human written content as well, especially in the critical Your Money or Your Life category, where Google applies the strictest quality controls as it covers financial and health content. It’s also being used (at least, according to Google) to analyse off-site content, to detect “inauthentic mentions” — such as faked user comments praising a product or those produced by the thousand automatically or for money.
What to do if you’ve been hit
If your website has been hit by Google’s use of AI to judge if your website meets their quality standards, fairly or not, then you might be wondering if you should just scrap the entire website and try something else. But it’s really not the end of the world. There are ways to recover.
Having your content unfairly judged as failing to make the grade is perhaps the most frustrating, and something that you will need to try to work out why. While the content may be accurate, impartial, insightful, and well-written, you need to ask if it is actually unique. Does it say something that isn’t repeated on every other page in the top ten results for your target keywords? Has it been copied word-for-word onto another website which is now scoring above you? Are the technical aspects of the page correct, allowing Google to correctly identify the canonical URL for the page?
It’s also helpful to get an objective opinion. The same tool behind Google’s automated evaluation is available to the general public. Asking Gemini to evaluate your page against Google’s quality guidelines will generally give you all the insight you need into correcting what might be wrong. Other AI tools would be able to do the job as well, but Gemini is cut from the same cloth as Google’s own AI rating tool.
Of course, maybe your content fails because it is spammy, unhelpful, derivative, or flat-out inaccurate. In which case, your best course of action would be to remove it from your website entirely.
