Marie Haynes asked Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison for more clarity on recovering from a helpful content update by “removing unhelpful content.” Danny’s response was that you should “self-assess” your content to understand if you believe it will be helpful to visitors.
Marie’s question was pretty detailed, she wrote:
Google’s documentation on the helpful content system talks about recovering by “removing unhelpful content” in order to get the unhelpful content classification removed.
Any chance we could get more clarity on this?
Do you mean:
- Remove parts of pages that contain large amounts of text readers will likely skip over?
- emove entire pages that offer little original value?
- perhaps both?
Does a site need to remove unhelpful content published in the past in order to recover? Or could they focus on simply producing content that is helpful and original from this point onwards. Would that be enough?
She referenced Google’s documentation that reads, “A natural question some will have is how long will it take for a site to do better, if it removes unhelpful content? Sites identified by this system may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content hasn’t returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.”
