![Google Working On Surfacing More Heartful Helpful Content In Search Google Working On Surfacing More Heartful Helpful Content In Search](https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/google-heart-header-1716121443.jpg)
Last week we reported how Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said how they are looking for ways to better promote sites that were hit by that helpful content update in September. Now, over the weekend, John Mueller from Google added, “the team working on this is explictly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update.”
John said this on X, making it clear that he “can’t make any promises” but he wrote, “the team working on this is explictly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update.” Then came this line, where he expresses his personal feelings about content creators who take “helpfulness to heart.” He wrote, “It would be great to show more users the content that folks have worked hard on, and where sites have taken helpfulness to heart.”
As a reminder, when the March 2024 core update came out, many who were hit by that September 2023 helpful content update were expecting to see some sort of recoveries but no one did. Talking about the “heart,” this was soul-crushing (let alone financially devastating) for so many of these publishers.
The issue might be that Google applied this helpful content signal, which is now in the core updates – helpful content updates are no longer too broadly? John wrote before that saying, “I imagine for most sites strongly affected, the effects will be site-wide for the time being, and it will take until the next update to see similar strong effects (assuming the new state of the site is significantly better than before).” This means to me that maybe some of the less helpful content on a site is dragging down the helpful content on that same site and maybe the ratio is just too much? I don’t know for sure.
Here is that post on X:
Yes, and I imagine for most sites strongly affected, the effects will be site-wide for the time being, and it will take until the next update to see similar strong effects (assuming the new state of the site is significantly better than before).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) May 18, 2024
It stems from this original post:
Yep, like I’ve been saying, Google’s helpful content system was baked into core, and there are site-level algorithms that are at play with broad core updates. It’s not as simple as saying “page-level” for assessing the helpfulness of content.