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In this article today we will talk about the 6th Google Ranking Signal – What is a Helpful Content System?
Read: Google’s Helpful Content Update
Image source: Google
This is the 6th Ranking Signal and in the same way, we have discussed all 19 Google Ranking Signals one by one, and if you have reached directly to this article.
Then you are requested to read and understand all these Ranking Signals in sequence because in these you are not going to get any benefit by reading or understanding any one ranking signal.
The Helpful Content System ranking signal was launched by Google on 18 August 2022 and this update was called Helpful Content Update.
By the way, when Google launched this update, at that time we published a complete article on it, in which we covered all the topics related to Helpful Content Update.
We have already talked about this ranking signal in another article, so in this article, we will not go into much detail about it, it will be just a brief introduction.
What Is a Helpful Content System?
A Helpful Content System means that Google wants to rank such content which is written by people for people.
This line is very simple to read but a very deep thing has been said in it.
Websites that post content only for the purpose of getting ranked on Google.
Google will Penalize all those websites under this Helpful Content System and will down their ranking.
But many SEOs took this line to mean that the content was written by the people, not by any AI Tool, and the line beyond that was written for the people.
How Does Helpful Content System Affect SEO?
Is also important who has written the content and for whom it has been written, it is also important and the purpose of the writer behind writing the content is also important.
Google has repeatedly said that we should not use AI-Generated content on our website because this type of content is not useful for people.
Now speaking like this about Google’s AI Tools does not mean that Google hates AI Tools, but Google’s saying means that people use this AI-generated content only for Google.
Now suppose you want to post an article on your website with the help of an AI Tool. Now we can have only two main reasons behind this –
- – You want to make the content of your website good so that your visitors can benefit.
- – You want to publish maximum content without paying money to Writers so that your website gets maximum traffic and you earn more.
Now here if we ask ourselves honestly, then most of us will find ourselves in this second category in which we want to drive maximum traffic to our website.
Most people want to use AI content only because it is easy and fast to generate it how much time will it take for a tool to generate an article?
Along with this, it is also cheap because the subscription to an AI Tool is less than the salary of a Writer.
Therefore, when a webmaster posts AI-Generated content on his website just for ranking, then that content is not useful for visitors because in such a situation the webmaster’s aim is not to help the visitor!
If you use AI Tools for research or for analysis or for refining data.
And then on the basis of this data, you prepare an article in which a lot of information is present, and whose purpose is the visitor of the website has to give such content which normally a Writer is not able to write.
Then your content will also be indexed and will also rank in Top Position.
That’s why Google is not calling this system Anti AI Signal, Anti Auto Generated System is also not calling it, and Manually Written Content Promotion Scheme is also not calling it, but the name of this system is Helpful Content System.
In all the examples I have given you so far, I have talked about AI Generated Content, but this does not mean that only AI Generated Content is bad or useless.
We mean to say that content that is posted only for the purpose of getting rank on Google, that content can never get a stable ranking, whether that content is written by AI Tools or written by a Human Writer.
This is a Site-Wide Signal, if you publish such AI-Generated or Unhelpful content on only a few pages of your website it triggers this Helpful Content System.
Then Google will down the ranking of your entire website and not just those pages on which you have published Unhelpful Content System.
Posted useful content is the most dangerous effect of this signal.
Read This: Google’s Explanation For Why Helpful Content Updates Seem Quiet
How To Optimize a Website For a Helpful Content System?
Make your content helpful for the user, no matter how you make it. If the motive of the content is to rank as quickly as possible, then this Helpful Content System will catch your content and bring down its rank so that your content will never rank.
If Google’s Helpful Content System sees unhelpful content on your website, then your website will not be out of rank overnight, but your website’s rank will gradually go down, which may take months.
It will not happen that your website which was taking 1000 users/day till yesterday will suddenly come to 100 users/day.
This system of Google reduces the rank gradually over months.
For websites whose rank is down because of this Helpful Content System, then if they remove this AI-Generated content from their website and keep publishing useful content continuously, then the effect of this system will end on your website and your website Will come back in rank.
But as it took months for this effect to come, in the same way, it may take months to remove it, but it is not that the rank cannot be fixed without the next Core Update or Helpful Content System Update.
But this process may take months, so it will be better if you do not use this type of content beforehand.
Now the question of many people is that how will Google know whether any content has been written by a human or by AI Tool.
How Will Google Know, Who Wrote The Content?
This question is also valid but Google does not give any answer about this and probably will never answer because Google is very genius in itself and it will never tell itself how they catch such unhealthy content.
Because if Google gives the answer to this, then people will definitely find a solution for this too.
Google has another company named DeepMind which is one of the top 3 companies in the world in Artificial Intelligence, with which Amazon is the first, IBM the second, and Deep Mind the third.
Google has kept many Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based models open source which anyone can use. Google is not new in the field of AI.
If Google can create systems for creating AI content like BERT, then it can also create systems for catching and I will not tell you how these systems work!
Conclusion
Hope you have got to know a lot about this 6th Google Ranking Signal – what is a Helpful Content System?
The motive of this entire ranking signal is that you optimize your content for the user and make the content valuable.
