Google Search's helpful content system and your website

Google Search's "helpful content" system sends out a signal that our automatic ranking systems use to make sure that search results show original, helpful content written by people for people. This page tells you more about how the system works and what you can do to evaluate your content and make it better.

How the helpful content system works

The goal of the helpful content method is to give more credit to content that makes visitors feel like they've had a good time, while content that doesn't meet visitors' expectations won't do as well.

The method makes a site-wide signal that we look at along with many other signals for Google Search and Discover. The system naturally finds content that doesn't seem to have much value, doesn't add much value, or isn't very helpful to people in other ways.

Any content, not just unhelpful content, on sites that have a lot of unhelpful content generally is less likely to do well in Search, as long as there is better content elsewhere on the web to show. Because of this, getting rid of content that isn't helpful could help your other content rank higher.

A machine-learning model is used to completely handle this classifier process. It works in all languages around the world. It is neither an action done by hand nor a spam action. Instead, it's just one of the many things Google looks at when deciding how to rank pages.

This means that some people-first content on sites labeled as having unhelpful content could still rank well if other signals show that the content is helpful and related to a query. The signal is also given a weight, so sites with a lot of information that isn't helpful may see a stronger effect.

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

To learn more about how to make content that works well with the helpful content system, check out our help page on how to make content that is helpful and trustworthy for people rather than for search engines. It has things you can ask yourself to figure out how good your content is.

Some people will likely wonder how long it will take for a site to do better after it gets rid of content that isn't helpful. Sites that this method finds may get the signal over the course of a few months. Our algorithm works all the time, so it can keep an eye on both new and old sites. As soon as it finds out that the useless content hasn't come back, the classification will no longer be needed.

We keep improving how the classifier finds information that isn't helpful. When we do this in a way that stands out, we share it as a "helpful content update" on our Google Search ranking changes page. After this kind of update is done going out, if the improved classifier sees that the content has gotten better, the not-helpful label from our old classifier may no longer apply.