One of the elements of digital marketing and considered the least important content creation is gaining fast. From spam-filled content now webmasters strive hard to make their writeups better and better. All this change has been brought about by Google Update “Google Helpful Content”.
Webmasters or content writers paid the least attention to acceptable keyword percentages and added as many as they could. This one was a winning strategy, and it worked. But there were a series of updates that were ruling out writeups not following their guidelines.
Panda Update End of Content Farms
It all started with Panda Update which was rolled out in the year February 2011. It was meant to rule out spammy and low-quality websites and blogs. It was meant to fight against black hat techniques and spam. Badly written content were also dumped. The falling quality of writeups was affecting Google’s performance on SERPs and to stem the rot Panda was rolled out.
Duplicate and repeat content, spelling mistakes and bad grammar were badly impacting Google’s performance which improved immensely after the introduction of Panda to the core algorithm.
Although webmasters and site owners had begun improving the writeups this was not enough, and so Google gave hints as to how they can make their content more useful.
Google Helpful Content
This was the final straw in the coffin. This update rolled out in the year 2022 August. It was meant to shift the focus of the writers to make their content more useful to readers rather than the target search engines. The visitors feel they are reading better content which is helping them rather than one that focuses on keywords. The update took two weeks to roll out and was a core update.
It is content for people first, and they should feel as such. Keywords and LSI should be included naturally. Write meaningfully, and do not add fluff since word count does not matter anymore. The writeups are most useful whence it is complete and meaningful. Thus, even short-form content will do for content marketing and SEO will work. The classifier runs continuously and sooner or later site penalty will be removed if you have rectified the content. Hence pay more attention to quality than quantity.