A Week After the Helpful Content Update Rolled Out, Google Released A Second Update
Back in August, Google announced that they were releasing a new ranking factor centered around measuring whether the content on a website is helpful or not.
In the beginning, many SEOs were concerned that the rollout of this update would be major, and make vast changes to SERPs. However, it surprised many experts by being rather quiet.
And now, just a week after the Helpful Content Update (HCU) was completed, Google has gone full throttle and released a broad core update on September 12.
Theories and Speculation About This Core Update
- Aside from shocking SEOs with a huge release so soon after HCU, some experts are suspecting that Google may be displeased with how little impact it had on results, and thus have released this broad core update to make bigger changes.
- On the other hand, another theory is that the broad core update was released in order to unleash the new ranking signal, and perhaps was the plan all along.
- Either way, Google has not specified what this broad core update targets, and as always suggests the same advice on how to respond if your site is negatively impacted.
- And as always, this update will take around 2 weeks to completely roll out (around September 26), so we will not know for certain its impact until then.
Timeline of Algorithm Updates from Google So Far for 2022
- February – Desktop Page Experience
- March – Product Reviews Update
- May – Broad Core Update
- July – Product Reviews Update
- August – Helpful Content Update
- September – Broad Core Update
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