Learn How Google’s Helpful Content System Works and Improve Your Content

Google Search’s helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results. If you want to understand how this system works and improve your content, read on.

How the helpful content system works Google’s helpful content system rewards content that visitors find satisfying, while content that doesn’t meet their expectations won’t perform as well. The system generates a site-wide signal that Google considers among many other signals for use in Google Search (including Discover). The system uses a machine-learning model to identify content that seems to have little value, low-added value, or is otherwise unhelpful to people.

Any content on sites with relatively high amounts of unhelpful content is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is better content elsewhere on the web. Therefore, removing unhelpful content can help the rankings of other content on your site.

This automated classifier process works globally across all languages and is not a manual action or spam action. Instead, it’s one of many signals that Google evaluates to rank content. People-first content on sites classified as having unhelpful content may still rank well if other signals identify it as helpful and relevant to a query. The signal is also weighted, meaning sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect.

What does this system and updates to it mean for your site?

To create content that’s successful with the helpful content system, focus on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content instead of search-engine first content. Google provides a help page with questions to help you assess and improve your content.

Removing unhelpful content could help improve the ranking of other content on your site, but the signal may take months to apply to sites identified by the system. The classifier runs continuously, monitoring new and existing sites, and the classification will no longer apply once the unhelpful content has not returned in the long term.

Google periodically refines how the classifier detects unhelpful content and shares these updates on the Google Search ranking updates page. After such an update finishes rolling out and if the refined classifier sees that content has improved, then the unhelpful classification from the previous classifier may no longer apply.