Google’s Helpful Content Update Can Demote & Promote Content

The other day we reported how Google will be releasing an update to the helpful content system that can identify “hidden gems” deep within the web and promote that in the Google Search results. As Glenn Gabe points out, that means that the helpful content system can now not only demote unhelpful content but now also promote, at the same time, “hidden gems” within the content.

Glenn Gabe asked Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, “With this update to the helpful content system, will the system soon be tackling multiple tasks (demote + promote)? I know in the past you said it could be expanded, so I wanted to make sure I understood this correctly.”

Danny Sullivan responded on Twitter saying, “The helpful content system will be working to identify and show more ‘hidden gems’ on Search, along with still working to ensure unhelpful content is not performing well.”

So in short, the Google helpful content update will soon be able to not just identify unhelpful content and demote that content but also be able to identify helpful content deep inside the web and promote it.

Here are those tweets:

The helpful content system will be working to identify and show more ‘hidden gems’ on Search, along with still working to ensure unhelpful content is not performing well. More on the hidden gems aspect is on our recent blog post: https://t.co/QlDczQA9NH pic.twitter.com/JLMwzZ8jGz

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 15, 2023

Here is how Glenn summed up Danny Sullivan’s response:

In other words, the HCU will be multitasking. 🙂 It can both promote & demote. I was talking w/@rustybrick about this in a recent video. e.g. The HCU can be expanded to handle more tasks, & that’s exactly what’s going on with the latest update where it will find ‘hidden gems’: pic.twitter.com/IYSRUjbbDZ

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 15, 2023

If you read the official Google helpful content page closely, you will see it is more about a negative aspect. “The helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well,” it says.

“The system automatically identifies content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to people,” see, more negative focused. It goes on and on with the negative sentiment, “Any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”

Expect this Google document to be updated when the new “hidden gem” Google helpful content system update rolls out.

Forum discussion at Twitter.