Hi Francesco,
Google's recent Helpful Content update is impacting a number of publishers. We're seeing some publishers benefitting from it, while other users are seeing drops in organic traffic. The purpose of the helpful content update is to prioritize user-first content that provides a good user experience and satisfies user search intent; while seemingly penalizing content that is designed to be "SEO-first" - in Google's eyes at least. In reality, Google aren't too open about what was changed, but some things we know:
- The update is designed to target sites that are relying on SEO tricks to benefit themselves in the search rankings, rather than sites that are doing well due to naturally good content that satisfies user search intent.
- Google have changed their wording of wanting content "for people, by people" to just wanting content "for people" - which signals that they've softened towards the use of AI-driven content.
- They've specifically stated that they don't like changing the dates of articles, to make them seem more fresh; when the actual content hasn't been updated.- It may not be related to the recent update, but Google have recently announced that backlinks are less important than they were previously - which may negatively impact sites that were previously benefitting from a lot of links.
- Anecdotal evidence in online communities seems to suggest that sites with UGC (user generated-content), such as Reddit, benefitted the most from this change.
In terms of what can be done to counter-act this update, the main priority for reversing course would be to focus on identifying areas where your site could provide more helpful content to users: focusing on satisfying search intent, providing a good user experience and demonstrating E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority and trust).
A good start for this would be the Landing Page report in Ezoic Analytics, https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/big-data-analytics-how-it-works. As those give you the insight of where users land on your site, while using search engines.
Furthermore, have a look at our NicheIQ tools which can help with key words analysis and general SEO performance of your site https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/getting-started-with-nicheiq
I hope this gives you a bit more insight into it 🙂
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