SEO
google logo

Everything We Know About Google’s September 2023 Helpful Content Update

By Joe Youngblood

Today Google’s Search Central X/Twitter handle announced an update to the Helpful Content system would be rolling out over the next few weeks. If you’re unfamiliar with the Helpful Content Update which started rolling out in August of 2022 read our guide on the first version of it.

Here Is Everything We Know About The Google Search September 2023 Helpful Content Update

September 2023 Helpful Content Update Vitals

  • Date Started: September 14th, 2023
  • Date Completed: September 28th, 2023
  • First Impact Reported: ‘Gurl Who Blogs’ reported a large drop in traffic from Google at 10:38pm on September 20th, 2023
  • Most Impacted Industry(ies): Blogging in general
  • Most Impacted Site(s): Unknown
  • Most Impacted Website Types: Blogs
  • Most Impacted Content Types: Blog content
  • SEO Change Proven to Improve: Unknown
  • Winners: Reddit and Quora appear to have came out on top of this update
  • Losers: Independent blogs operated by subject matter experts appear to have lost during this update

1. One of the updates to the Helpful Content System classifier appears to be to include subdomain content and/or scrutinize subdomain content more in order to catch websites who “rent” out subdomains to help more nefarious businesses rank higher in SERPs than they normally would. It would appear Google is absolutely going after content on subdomains that have nothing in common with the main site or are extremely low quality. Gary Illyes announced this on his LinkedIn where he said: “We’ve heard (and also noticed) that some sites “rent out” their subdomains or sometimes even subdirectories to third-parties, typically without any oversight over the content that’s hosted on those new, generally low quality micro-sites that have nothing to do with the parent site. In fact the micro-sites are rarely ever linked from the parent sites, which don’t actually want to endorse these often questionable sites. The only reason the owners of these shady (?) micro-sites rent the sub-spaces is to manipulate search results.”

“… some sites “rent out” their subdomains or sometimes even subdirectories to third-parties, typically without any oversight over the content that’s hosted on those new, generally low quality micro-sites that have nothing to do with the parent site…” – Gary Illyes, Google

This means that if you have indexed subdomain content that is unhelpful to humans or extremely low quality, that content is now going to be factored into rankings for the content on your main site and possibly other subdomains. No word on how this will impact sites like WordPress.com, Shopify, and other similar content hosts that allow users to have a subdomain related to their main domain free of charge. If it is anything like Panda, the results could be devastating. Panda is coincidently what caused most of these services to stop giving out subfolders, which had been the norm since the early days of Geocities and Tripod, and instead give out subdomains to free users.

Google’s documentation on this update / the Helpful Content System includes this statement on subdomains: “If you host third-party content on your main site or in your subdomains, understand that such content may be included in site-wide signals we generate, such as the helpfulness of content. For this reason, if that content is largely independent of the main site’s purpose or produced without close supervision or the involvement of the primary site, we recommend that it should be blocked from being indexed by Google.”

2. This update WILL likely impact your entire website. The Helpful Content signal is a site-wide ranking signal generated by this new system (which Google has now named the “Helpful Content System”) that works to help the engine surface content that appears to be helping humans. They accomplish this by automatically identifying content that has little value to humans, has low added value, or is just not very helpful or useful to humans. Then the system considers how much of this type of content you have on your site, possibly as a whole number (volume) or as a portion of our site (percentage) and if it crosses a threshold Google does not disclose, then all of the content on your site will start performing worse. The original documentation on the Helpful Content System made it sound like the threshold was a percentage with this statement: “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”

3. This will impact your ability to rank in Google Discover (the news and content displayed below the Google search box in the Google mobile app). The updated documentation (as of February 23rd, 2023) makes this clear stating: “The system generates a site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals for use in Google Search (which includes Discover).”

Known Impacts Caused by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update

A blogger on X (formerly Twitter) who goes by “Gurl Who Blogs” noticed a major drop in traffic on September 20th, roughly halfway through the update:

Other bloggers / site owners commiserated in the replies to the X post sharing losses as well around the same time

On September 21st what appears to be a finance news and tips website also appears to have lost a lot of traffic.

A few phishing websites saw a massive surge in high rankings according to SEMrush’s “Winner’s” data. This happened while the update was rolling out and may be wiped out before it completes OR later on once other Google algorithms review those websites.

A person reported a hit, which would be the first know if accurate, of a 92% drop in traffic in early September: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/16uaw4n/92_loss_of_traffic_since_the_first_week_of/

Reddit, a social media site, saw a massive surge towards the end of the update:

Quora, a Q and A website, also saw a big surge in traffic

How To Know If You Were Negatively Impacted By The Helpful Content System Update Of September 2023

1. The update started rolling out on September 14th, 2023 and should take approximately 14-days to complete. That means it should be done around September 28th, 2023. Wait until the update is announced as complete, then examine any pages that lost traffic during this update. While Google states “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” looking at pages that lost traffic (or key rankings of course) during this period of time compared to the period immediately prior (considering seasonality issues) should at least give you pages to start examining.

2. A sudden loss of sales, phone calls, or leads that you had previously tracked from organic search during the 14-day update period or immediately after, might also be a good sign that Google’s Helpful Content System found too much unhelpful content on your site and demoted key content pages in the consumer’s buying journey.

What To Do If You Are Impacted By The September 2023 Helpful Content Update On Google Search

1. Do not panic, panic rarely helps solve SEO problems and mostly just gives yourself and any of your team members / stakeholders more unhealthy stress.

2. Examine content that lost traffic from organic search / key rankings in Google / Google Discover traffic and look for clues that the content might indeed by unhelpful.

3. Look at content on your subdomains. Many businesses have subdomains for admins, blogs, press releases, etc.. some of these can fall prey to malicious abuse over the years such as comment spam for links, hacked blog posts, or worse hosting things like malware.

4. If your business uses WordPress make sure your site is removing tag pages, media attachment pages, junk pages created by your theme or plugins, demo or duplicated template pages, and possibly even category pages. Only 2 free to use WordPress SEO plugins effectively handle these unhelpful junk content pages, Yoast and RankMath. If you’re using any other SEO plugin (or none at all) you could be having issues as many of these pages are generated silently inside of your site and other SEO plugins simply do not handle all of them out of the box.

5. Check your site for duplicate content, especially where that duplicate content is long-winded or verbose and is duplicated from a third-party site. For example most Motorola Authorized Dealers just use the content created by Motorola and used on their pages, but this is all duplicate. Most of these dealers simply never get indexed but only a handful that convince Google to index them end up ranking and there’s a good chance with the large volumes of content this generates a reduction in traffic from the Helpful Content System.

6. Check your site for any sort of auto-generated pages. For example does your site automatically generate a lot of public pages for new customers who signup or about new topics they search for? Most automatically created content (not AI content) is likely going to be deemed low-quality by this update and cause harm to your site.

7. Ask your content team if they are using AI generated content. If they are, then you need to ask if they are: Reviewing that content for accuracy and grammar, AND if they are rewriting that content before publication. The reality is that AI generated content can be good but it can also be extremely bad, and each AI/LLM system tends to generated repetitive copy when given similar prompts, so there’s a good chance your competitors might create highly similar if not duplicate versions of your content while using the same or a similar AI/LLM system. There are AI writing programs like WriteAI that include teamwork tools and a rewriting function that can make this process a lot easier and help your team produce helpful high-quality content with ease.

8. Finally, while Google strives to discover sites with lots of unhelpful content, they of course are fallible. There are countless reports of sites losing traffic during the original HCU last year that were baffled as to why Google considered their sites to have unhelpful content. We’ve noted highly helpful blog posts, information rich unique news articles, and other content losing organic search traffic with the HCU as the likely culprit, but no way to correlate to low-quality or unhelpful content.

How to Make Your Content More Helpful

If you examine your content and see no obvious signs of why the content lost traffic or might have been considered unhelpful her are some tips on improving it:

  • Look at the “Discovered – currently not indexed” and “Crawled – currently not indexed” Pages reports in Google Search Console and try to see if any content you believe is high-quality is not in the index. For example we recently took on a client with brilliantly written, high-quality, blog content created by an expert in the field but nearly 95% of it was not indexed by Google. If content is not indexed, it is likely not being considered for the Helpful Content System classifier. Make requesting that this content gets indexed a priority (GSC will limit you to approximately 10 total requests per day, it could take multiple requests per document to get them all or mostly indexed).
  • Look at the #1 ranking content, or even #2 and #3 ranking for your target keyword. Look for things they mention on their site that might be helpful to humans. For example, a ranking of local Greek restaurants might include their addresses and an embedded Google map. Then see how you can incorporate these things on your pages.
  • If your content is a list or includes a list, examine lists that did not appear to get hit. Look not at just what items they mention, but look for words or phrases they include that might make those list items appear more helpful. For example a list of artists might include the medium they work with the most or a list of athletes might include their awards or accolades.
  • Consider adding questions and answering them. Look at People Also Ask or use tools like Also Asked to find questions people are asking about your topic. Don’t worry about the search volume with them, but consider the importance of those questions to various consumer journeys. Then take the most important ones and answer them in your content.
  • If you publish long-form content as blog posts or guides or whatever and you are not using a Table of Contents as navigation for users, I would highly recommend it. This itself my not be a signal to Google, but users staying on your page and navigating through the content could be. On WordPress you can use Table of Contents Plus or Easy Table of Contents to accomplish this. On Shopify I recommend using our Shopify app, Jump Links to accomplish this and get a bonus internal link building to recommended products.
  • If your page is small, short, or sums up a topic with brevity then consider developing a Pillar Page for the target query as they are often more fulfilling to users than smaller pages. You can always test this and revert back to the old content later (make a backup of course).
  • If your page is long-form, is verbose, or includes a lot of filler content, then consider making your page shorter and more brief. You can always test this and revert back to the old content later (make a backup of course).

Resources On The September 2023 Helpful Content System Update

Google’s documentation on the Helpful Content Update, Archived on September 15th, 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230915160915/https://developers.google.com/search/updates/helpful-content-update

Media Coverage

Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update Rolling Out With Improved Classifier by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable: https://www.seroundtable.com/september-2023-google-helpful-content-update-rolling-out-36047.html

Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update – Changes To The Algorithm by Roger Montti on Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-september-2023-helpful-content-update-changes-to-the-algorithm/496454/#close

Google September 2023 helpful content system update rolling out by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/google-september-2023-helpful-content-system-update-rolling-out-431978

Joe Youngblood

view all posts

Joe Youngblood is a top Dallas SEO, Digital Marketer, and Marketing Theorist. When he's not working with clients or writing about marketing he spends time supporting local non-profits and taking his dogs to various parks.

2COMMENTS Join the Conversation →