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Although Google told us the site reputation abuse policy would go into effect on Sunday, May 5, Danny Sullivan tweeted on Monday evening that the manual actions were currently being handed out and that the algorithmic component was not yet live. At the time I write this, we have seen the first manual actions. I […]

The March 2024 Update has finally finished rolling out. We have a lot to study and learn about before we can understand what happened with this update.   What’s most important to know: Google called the March Core and spam updates “an evolution in how [they] identify the helpfulness of content.” (See below for my […]

Marie Haynes. March 27, 2024. The helpful content system has changed. As of March 2024, it is no longer its own separate system, but now, helpfulness is determined primarily on the page level by Google's core systems. I spent some time reviewing Google's previous wording to help us understand this significance of what has changed. […]

Two articles were published this week that spoke of the frustration most of us who have worked in SEO have felt over the dominance of large brands for many search results. I’d like to share why I think Google has this problem, and why I think we will soon be seeing a change where more […]

Google announced a number of significant changes to Assistant. The majority of coverage so far has been surrounding the many things that will be discontinued like sending an email with your voice for example. With no fanfare, the blog post quietly stated that “the microphone icon will now trigger Search Results” from within the Google […]

The helpful content system produces a signal that is a "negative classification". Sites that have this classification are suppressed from ranking at their full potential. But why do some sites improve during a helpful content system? It may be simply at the expense of those who were suppressed. Or, there is another explanation. Google may […]

Updated June 10 with more info to give us hope for recovery! Once you've read this article, jump on over to this one, published in June in which we see that we may need to see another core update in order to see recovery following a helpful content suppression. The September 2023 Helpful Content has […]

The September 2023 helpful content update is live. This blog post explains everything we know about it so far.

Google's documentation on the helpful content system does not give us specific instructions for recovery. Their article on this system hints in a couple of places that the key to removing a suppression at the hands of this system is to "remove unhelpful content." However, they don't give much to specifically tell us which content […]