There was a major update from Google this week. Helpful content. It dropped like a bomb on the 14th of September, laying waste to many sites.

I totally missed it. I am signed up for about 6 SEO newsletters, but I’m busy, focusing on my own strategies and only focusing on rule changes from Google, not alogoryth updates so much. Usually, my clients are only positively affected by Google updates anyway, and this was the case this week.

But the chatter finally reached me, and I can see lots of “Oh Woe is Me! Google has destroyed my useful, unique, marketing-leading site!” I’m like… really? Let me check that.

As it turns out, no, they didn’t.

Look. Over the last few years, there has been this huge push to create content that is

SEO Strategy A

  • Unique.

  • Comparison based.

  • Skyscraper (ie – the longest, with the most keywords mentioned)

  • Heavily interlinked, and externally linked

But with little focus on.

SEO Strategy B (Mine)

  • Working out what users are in fact, trying to learn.

  • If they want to know “A” then do they want to know B to Z, or just B, C and D?

  • UX. Add too much advertising, reading the content becomes painful. Readers will bounce.

At the start of the year, two new clients brought sites to me that were penalised/filtered because of these issues. Different clients brought them to me. In both cases, I presented the solution (Method B, not Method A.)

Client one Disagreed
No, I don’t believe you, I am not doing it, I am not paying you.(?!?)
I said OK. Let’s see how that goes. They ended up doing half, but not all of my recommended fixes(didn’t pay me half), but missed the major recommendation of “give people what they really want”.
Their site? Down 25% this week. I expect it to keep dropping.

Client Two agreed there might be a Problem
But they had other sites, with a similar structure that had not yet been penalised. I tried to explain, that this was a critical business risk. 1 site from a family of 15 heavily penalised… others not(yet). The risk was a 5% tightening of the Google Helpful Content algorithm catching these other sites too.  SEO risk minimisation is, however, hard to get budget for.  Fixing disasters?  Sure.  But minimising risk?  It’s just not something a lot of companies like to spend money on.
Their Sites? All sites in the network are down 20 to 40%.

Helpful content =

  • Understand what people want.
  • Give it to them.
  • Be better.  Not necessarily longer.

That’s it. It’s not rocket science.