‘People-first content’ has become one of the buzzwords within the SEO-world. As all websites require content strategies to be successful, you must definitely know what Google measures, how Google assesses your site and what questions/changes would be necessary should your site ranking drop unexpectedly.
What Is Google’s Helpful Content System?
Google’s Helpful Content System is a major element of Search’s content evaluation and ranking system. Launched in 2022, it was intended to demote rankings of content that has no inherent value to the user, while rewarding content that has high user value. In March 2024, Google folded the Helpful Content System into its broader core ranking systems. That change mattered. It meant helpfulness stopped being something evaluated periodically, in occasional ‘updates,’ and became a continuous, real-time signal baked into how every page and site gets assessed. There’s no longer a single ‘helpful content update’ you wait for and recover from, it’s always running in the background.
Why ‘Site-Wide’ Changes The Game
The page-by-page evaluation framework that traditional SEO is based on will no longer be effective. Google’s classifier looks for signals throughout a domain. The presence of a considerable amount of thin, unoriginal, or search engine-first content will negatively impact the rankings of even the best content on your domain. Even if your domain contains a handful of extremely good, thoroughly researched articles, that may not be enough to prevent negative rankings if they are surrounded by a large volume of search query capture content.
Therefore, simply aiming to create a few great articles is not sufficient. You need to take into account the existing weak content on your domain as well.
The ‘Who, How And Why’ Framework
In their official documentation, Google recommends site owners evaluate their content against the following questions:
Who Created The Content?
Is it clear who created the content? Does the content contain a byline in a place that is conspicuous? Sites that do not disclose authorship, or which publish content without stating who created it, will find it difficult to establish the ‘who’ signal of trust.
How Was The Content Produced?
Was there a method behind the madness? Research? Editing? Fact-checking? Input? Was there oversight? Was it mass-produced? Utilising AI to cover keywords? Google is very clear that the automatic processing of content takes place. However, content produced at scale with little to no human involvement or value is exactly what the system was made to detect.
What Is The Reasoning Behind the Content?
What gives this the most weight? Was it made with the intent to create content that would answer a real audience need? Or, was it made to pull search clicks? Google’s stance is pretty clear on this one. Content with the primary purpose of targeting search is treated as a bad actor.
E-E-A-T: The Framework Behind Google’s Content System
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Human raters assess sample search results to provide feedback for Google to assess the performance of its systems using the Search Quality Rater Guidelines which Google publishes annually.
The assessment of E-E-A-T does not impact content in search engine results, however, Google’s E-E-A-T concepts influence the development of automated systems that determine search engine rankings. Therefore, it is beneficial to analyse each of the concepts:
Experience: Does the content creator provide an example of having real-world experience with the topic?
Expertise: Does the content creator know the topic?
Authoritativeness: What is the reputation of the content creator and the domain on which the content appears?
Trustworthiness: Does the content appear safe? Google views trust most highly of the four concepts and the other three concepts support trust.
Your Money Or Your Life
The assessment of E-E-A-T also carries more importance for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content. YMYL content includes, but is not limited to, topics that impact a person’s health, financial stability, safety, or wellbeing. For example, content in the field of finance, medical, legal and safety requires a higher standard of demonstrated expertise and trustworthy content.
Signals That Get Content Flagged As Unhelpful
Google has clear patterns that its systems can spot and will warn about. There are some strategies that you should definitely take a hard look at if your content has any of these elements:
- Content is written to answer a question, but only to get traffic. The answer is written as an afterthought.
- Summaries that provide no original analysis and require users to go to other sources for a complete reply.
- Content written on many topics with broad, superficial coverage.
- Content that does not answer the question. Readers are forced to repeat the search.
- Content that answers a highly specific question using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) focused keywords instead of answering a question that actually provides an answer to the user.
- Content that is generated using Automation or Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is completely or almost fully automated and lacks human oversight.
These are all concepts that have been well known in SEO for years. What has changed is how Google’s systems have improved in identifying these, with the full domain getting penalised for pages that are rewarded for such content.
How To Write Content With Users In Mind
Understanding the theory is important. Here is how to apply it:
Begin With A Person And A Question
Before one word is typed, identify the person for whom you are writing and the question that this content will answer. If you can’t do this then you can’t move on to writing.
What Top-ranking Pages Lack
Unique data and direct experiences and the willingness to articulate better and provide real-world examples. Perhaps you include commentary from Subject Matter Experts. In doing so, the reader has a reason to visit your page as opposed to having the same information provided amongst the first five results.
Make Authorship Apparent
Provide bylines and where appropriate, author bios that provide real-world case studies and expertise. This impacts your ‘Who’ and ‘Expertise’ signals that Google reviews.
Demonstrate Work
In particular, for topics that are Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), elaborate on your process and have clear and comprehensible end statements. It is more important to appear open and explain your reasoning than to reach an outcome that was correct.
Answer The Question
An extensive response is preferable and a shorter response is not preferable, but being detailed and providing examples that answer the question and then ceasing is preferable to providing a response that is padded and verbose.
Audit And Prune Content
Google judges the quality of your content by how thorough you are, but overly verbose content is bad. So you should provide more examples that are people-first, answer relevant questions and be concise.
