The dreaded Helpful Content Update – better late than never.

Last week the news broke out about on Search Central Blog the latest algorithm update from Google.

This time aimed at promoting content that „to better ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic.”

At long last.

You know what they say, better late than never.

How long did we have to suffer from overoptimized texts that could not answer the desired question, instead taking us on a long and tedious journey?

The last few years have seen the advent of AI-assisted writing tools that have pushed the limits of what it means to write a good text from a search engine perspective.

REMEMBER: ANSWER THE QUESTION AND PROVIDE INFORMATION IN AN APPROACHABLE MANNER.

Nowadays, due to the sheer amount of text-wise optimation, finding the answer to the query bordered on the impossible.

Let’s take a popular topic on my home turf. In Poland, we have a still fresh law that prohibits certain businesses (supermarkets, many retail SMBs) from opening on Sundays. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule. On a few Sundays, all business can be open.

No one remembers when are those Sundays. So people turn to Google to find the answer.

A simple query: „is 21.08.2022 a shopping Sunday?” should provide a simple yes or no answer.

However, in our over-optimized world, we are treated with a list of results with one thing in common. Before answering the question, they are bombing us with irrelevant content made for the sake of search engines.

I, for one, despise this approach.

Surfer SEO suggests that to rank for a simple query, we need to build a text that:

• has 7,800–16,487 characters or 1000 – 2200 words
• has 40 paragraphs
• has 13-18 headings

All of this madness to answer a simple question!

This goes on because we often encourage our copywriting team to beat the best results in tools like Surfer SEO so that we can go above and beyond the competition.

We all emphasize the importance of UX, but we tend to forget about it while chasing rankings.

I am looking forward to this update as I want the user firendly, clutter-free web back.