Google’s Upcoming ‘Helpful Content’ Update Will Shake Up Search Results

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Today, Google revealed it is preparing a massive update called the Helpful Content Update that may be the biggest change to the search engine’s algorithm in years.

The update is aiming to filter out sites that have large amounts of content that are written solely for the search engine, without providing value to actual users.

Or, as Google simply put it in its announcement:

“The helpful content update aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”

Here’s what we know about the update so far:

What Is The Google Helpful Content Update?

Philosophically, there is little about the helpful content update which is all that different from what Google has been working towards in the past. 

The algorithm update aims to help users find the most high-quality content which will be the most helpful. What sets it apart is how it aims to achieve this.

In this instance, Google plans to improve search results by targeting and removing what could be called “search engine-first content” or content written expressly for the purpose of boosting rankings without actually delivering quality content to readers.

While the algorithm will be applied to all Google search results when it rolls out, the company said four specific types of sites are most likely to be affected:

  • Online educational materials
  • Arts & entertainment
  • Shopping
  • Tech

Content in these niches seem to be most prone to being written specifically for search engines rather than humans and Google hopes to improve the quality of results in these areas.

As a representative from Google told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz:

“If you search for information about a new movie, you might have previously encountered articles that aggregated reviews from other sites without adding perspectives beyond what’s available elsewhere on the web. This isn’t very helpful if you’re expecting to read something new. With this update, you’ll see more results with unique information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven’t seen before.”

Is your site safe?

Rather than provide a simple checklist of things companies can do to prepare their website, Google offered a series of questions that can be used to determine if you’re creating content for humans or search engines:

  • Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you? 
  • Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
  • Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
  • After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
  • Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
  • Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?

Additionally, the Google Search Central article provided a similar list of questions you can use to avoid search-engine first content in the future:

  • Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
  • Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
  • Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
  • Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
  • Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
  • Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
  • Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
  • Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
  • Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?

When Will It Arrive

The helpful content update is due to roll out next week to all English-language search results in the U.S. The company plans to expand the update to other languages and countries sometime in the future.

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Google Gives E-Commerce Brands 6 New Tips For Standing Out

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A new video from Google focuses on helping e-commerce brands stand out on the search engine, including specific strategies for ensuring your listing is eligible for search features that make your listing more prominent and visible.

For starters, the video lists three general guidelines for making your products stand out:

  1. Images help visitors understand your products
  2. Product reviews and star ratings increase trust in your brand
  3. Pricing and availability information allows shoppers to choose the best seller for their needs

With that in mind, Google’s Alan Kent then breaks down six ways to make your site more visible on the search engine.

1) Title Tags

As one of the first things any searcher will see, title tags are crucial for helping searchers understand your web pages. This is why site owners should take extra care when preparing the titles for their pages – especially product pages.

“A good title link can greatly help users understand your offering, bringing quality traffic to your site. … Low-quality title links can harm a users’ impression of your site.”

While Google will rewrite title tags if it believes the existing titles do not adequately describe the related page, it is better to deliver informative titles on your own.

Kent also advises against adding time-sensitive product details like pricing or availability in titles because they may be outdated by the time this information is updated in search results.

2) High-Quality Images

Improving the quality of your product images can make shoppers feel more confident about your products and their potential decision to purchase. 

As Kent says, “we’ve observed that users generally respond well to high-quality images and recommend that key images be at least 1200 pixels wide.”

Once these images are in place, Kent suggests checking the Max Image Preview metadata as that provides Google with guidance on how to handle images within search results.

Additionally, best practices indicate you should use product structured data to allow Google to pick the best images to display in search results.

Lastly, he provided some broad guidance for product photos, encouraging e-commerce brands to focus on creating product photos that best help shoppers understand their products. For example, you might highlight different angles or provide size comparisons within product photos.

3) Share Rich Product Data

Google uses structured data to more easily understand web pages and enable them to be shown as rich results or “special presentation treatments”. 

Specifically, Kent emphasizes that these details should always be included in structured product data:

  • Product Title
  • Description
  • Images
  • Ratings
  • Price
  • Availability

Kent also encourages brands to regularly use the Search Console URL Indexing tool and Rich Results Test tool to ensure you don’t have any issues with structured data on your site.

4) Share Price Drop Data

Google uses special price drop presentations to highlight special deals in search results. Still, e-commerce brands must share pricing information with the search engine and include the Offer property in the product structured data to be eligible.

However, there is no guarantee your listing will be shown in a special price drop presentation once you’ve provided these details.

5) Identify Products You Sell

Use accurate product identifiers – such as GTIN identifiers – along with Google Merchant Center data and structured product data to make your site eligible for product carousels.

6) Create a Business Profile Listing

Kent advises brands to create a Google Business Profile via the Google Business Profile Manager if their shop also has a brick-and-mortar location. 

This enables your site to be included in local search results which makes your physical locations more visible in search.

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Google Finally Shuts Down The Google My Business App

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Google My Business is officially gone as the GMB mobile app has finally stopped functioning.

Now, instead of being able to edit your local listing, see your insights, or respond to customers, business operators will only see a short message reading “the Google My Business app is no longer available” if you open the app.

Google My Business shutdown notice

Of course, the shutdown of the GMB app is not sudden. The company announced it would be discontinuing the app when it revealed it was rebranding local business listings to Google Business Profiles.

Thankfully, you do have other options if you have still been using the GMB app to manage your listing. 

Along with being able to update your listing through Google Search, you can also manage your listing through the Google Maps app. 

With this, Google has finally eliminated the final remaining artifact from Google My Business in favor of allowing businesses to manage their listings directly within Google Search and the existing Google Maps app for a more seamless experience. Though not explicitly stated, the goal seems to be simplifying managing your local SEO without the need for an entirely separate platform like GMB.

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Google Clarifies Googlebot Doesn’t Always Crawl Entire Webpages

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In an update to the help documentation for Googlebot, the search engine’s crawling tool, Google explained it will only crawl the first 15 MB of any webpage. Anything after this initial 15 MBs will not influence your webpage’s rankings.

As the Googlebot help document states:

“After the first 15 MB of the file, Googlebot stops crawling and only considers the first 15 MB of the file for indexing.

The file size limit is applied on the uncompressed data.”

Though this may initially raise concerns since images and videos can easily exceed these sizes, the help document makes clear that media or other resources are typically exempt from this Googlebot limit:

“Any resources referenced in the HTML such as images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript are fetched separately.”

What This Means For Your Website

If you’ve been following the most commonly used best practices for web design and content management, this should leave your website largely unaffected. Specifically, the best practices you should be following include:

  • Keeping the most relevant SEO-related information relatively close to the start of any HTML file. 
  • Compressing images.
  • Leaving images or videos unencoded into the HTML when possible.
  • Keeping HTML files small – typically less than 100 KB.
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Google Shares 8 SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

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Ecommerce websites have become a major part of the internet as online shopping has taken off in recent years. However, the unique nature and structure of these sites can make them uniquely tricky to optimize. 

Product variant pages, annual sales, and the need for lots of high-quality images may make it difficult to optimize these pages using some traditional SEO strategies, while other techniques remain essential for high rankings.

Thankfully, Google’s own Alan Kent has produced a short video full of SEO tips specifically for ecommerce sites. I’ll embed the full video at the bottom of the page, but we’ll also be sharing the highlights below:

8 Tips for Ecommerce SEO

  1. Cover the Basics: Basic technical SEO like allowing Google to crawl your site or using proper page titles is crucial for helping Google find and understand your website. For starters, make sure page titles feature your brand name and product details (such as color) and use structured data to make your product pages easy for Google to sort through your online store pages.
  2. Create Content for Every Stage of the Shopping Journey: Google knows that searchers are often looking for information rather than wanting to buy right now. This is why the search engine prioritizes sites with a wide array of content for every stage of the buyer’s journey. To help you get started brainstorming, Kent suggests providing gift ideas, highlighting reviews, and including detailed information about your products.
  3. Markup Product Variant Pages: To keep product variants well organized, ensure every variant has a unique URL and establish a canonical page.
  4. Reuse Regular Sale URLs: Preserve URLs from sales so they can be reused later. For example, you’ll want to use the same URLs every year for holiday sales.
  5. Performance: When shoppers are ready to buy, they want to do so as quickly as possible. When your page is competing against a similar product page for a spot in the search results, speed is often the tiebreaker that will help you come out ahead.
  6. Be Patient: SEO takes time to gain momentum. In many cases, it can take months for changes to impact your rankings. Don’t try to rush things or change strategies because you’re getting restless. Just keep working on improving your overall SEO.
  7. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help: Every site is unique and may not benefit equally from Google’s broad advice. Don’t hesitate to ask SEO experts how to best optimize your site or how to adopt these strategies to your needs.
  8. Focus on Users: At the end of the day, Google wants to provide the best possible site for users. Be that site. 
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The Top Google Searches From The U.S. and Worldwide

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Have you ever wondered what the most searched keywords and phrases on Google are? 

While the search engine regularly details trending search topics and trends, the company does not share details on the top overall search terms. Thankfully, Ahrefs used data from over 19.8 billion keywords to list the top searches in the U.S. and worldwide on their own.

To generate the list, Ahrefs looked at the number of times search terms were used each month and averaged these monthly totals over the course of a year. 

Below, we will share the top 50 Google Searches in the U.S. and worldwide. For complete lists of the top 100 searches and lists of the most frequently searched questions, check out the full report here.

Top 50 U.S. Google Searches

#KeywordSearch volume
1facebook160,000,000
2youtube151,000,000
3amazon121,000,000
4weather103,000,000
5google70,000,000
6walmart63,000,000
7gmail59,000,000
8google translate42,000,000
9home depot41,000,000
10yahoo mail39,000,000
11yahoo38,000,000
12wordle34,000,000
13election results33,000,000
14fox news32,000,000
15december global holidays28,000,000
16ebay28,000,000
17food near me28,000,000
18instagram26,000,000
19costco24,000,000
20restaurants near me24,000,000
21nfl24,000,000
22nba24,000,000
23google maps24,000,000
24amazon prime23,000,000
25starbucks23,000,000
26weather tomorrow23,000,000
27best buy22,000,000
28cnn22,000,000
29walgreens21,000,000
30translate20,000,000
31espn20,000,000
32lowes20,000,000
33mcdonalds19,000,000
34craigslist19,000,000
35usps tracking19,000,000
36news19,000,000
37zillow18,000,000
38traductor18,000,000
39nfl scores17,000,000
40calculator16,000,000
41twitter16,000,000
42target16,000,000
43wells fargo15,000,000
44netflix15,000,000
45restaurants15,000,000
46bank of america15,000,000
47food14,000,000
48chick fil a14,000,000
49cvs14,000,000
50indeed14,000,000

Top 50 Google Searches Worldwide

#KeywordSearch volume
1youtube1,163,000,000
2facebook1,033,000,000
3google513,000,000
4whatsapp web490,000,000
5weather400,000,000
6gmail394,000,000
7translate367,000,000
8amazon348,000,000
9google translate332,000,000
10instagram301,000,000
11traductor235,000,000
12hotmail206,000,000
13cricbuzz196,000,000
14tiempo170,000,000
15fb146,000,000
16satta king123,000,000
17yahoo mail121,000,000
18yahoo119,000,000
19weather tomorrow110,000,000
20google maps108,000,000
21погода99,000,000
22tradutor89,000,000
23sarkari result86,000,000
24переводчик85,000,000
25yandex83,000,000
26tiempo mañana78,000,000
27walmart76,000,000
28ebay74,000,000
29traduçoes72,000,000
30nba72,000,000
31flipkart67,000,000
32google traduction65,000,000
33çeviri64,000,000
34wordle63,000,000
35meteo62,000,000
36bbc news61,000,000
37satta60,000,000
38hava durumu53,000,000
39ютуб52,000,000
40dolar51,000,000
41home depot50,000,000
42вконтакте48,000,000
43dr46,000,000
44cowin46,000,000
45xsmb46,000,000
46amazon prime45,000,000
47snaptik45,000,000
48ipl45,000,000
49wetter44,000,000
50december global holidays44,000,000
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How To Get a Google Review Removed Online

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No one likes receiving a bad review. Not only do they affect your company’s morale, but they can also easily scare off future customers if they check your reviews – and they will almost certainly read your reviews. Studies have shown that 98% of consumers read online reviews before doing business with a local company.

At the same time, there is usually very little you can do about a legitimate negative online review. In most cases, the best solution is to be humble, apologize for not delivering the quality service or products expected, and do your best to make it right.

Still, there are a few types of reviews that require more extreme responses. Thankfully, when dealing with fake, spammy, or inappropriate reviews, you may be able to get the offending reviews deleted entirely.

When Can a Review Be Deleted?

There are strict rules about what types of reviews can be deleted. 

For obvious reasons, complaints that appear to be legitimate complaints about a poor experience with your brand can not be deleted. 

However, Google can remove reviews for your business if they break the company’s policies and guidelines. These include rules banning deceptive, explicit, or irrelevant. Below, we will talk a bit more about exactly what violations may make a review subject to removal.

Offensive Content

As described by Google, offensive content may include any sort of content “that is clearly and deliberately provocative.”

This includes any form of hate speech or harassment, as well as reviews containing personal information.

Deceptive Content

Misleading or inaccurate reviews are a regular occurrence online. In some cases, competitors may try to hurt your reputation by manufacturing a poor experience. Personal conflicts between individuals may also boil over and result in negative reviews in an effort to get an individual fired.

This is why Google does not allow any review that is not an accurate representation of a real experience with a brand.

Mature Content

To ensure content on the search engine remains safe for all users, Google will delete any reviews containing profanity, sexually explicit content, adult themes, or graphic violence.

Regulated or Illegal Content

Reviews may not contain calls to action for products or services which may be subject to local legal restrictions. Additionally, Google warns that dangerous activities or illegal content will get reviews removed.

Irrelevant Content

Lastly, reviews must be related to an actual experience with a company’s products or services. That means rants, off-topic content, or attempts to promote one’s own products are subject to removal.

How To Get an Online Review Removed

Obviously, brands can not directly delete reviews from their Google Business Profiles. Instead, a company representative must report a review for removal through Google Search or Google Maps.

Once reported, Google will assess the review and determine if it violates any of the platform’s policies. Though this process may take several days, brands can also mitigate the damage of a misleading or inappropriate review with a response explaining the reality of the situation and noting that the review has been reported to Google.

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Google To End Support For Expanded Text Ads This Month

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As announced last August, Google is set to stop allowing advertisers to create, edit, or start running expanded text ads across the search engine’s ad network starting June 30, 2022.

Though expanded text ads have been a popular way to make your ads stand out and increase click-through rates, the company says it plans to replace the ad format with responsive search ads.

The goal, according to Google, is to simplify running ads while using automation to improve ad performance. 

According to the announcement, advertisers who have already made the switch from expanded text ads to responsive search ads saw an average 7% increase in their conversions.

Why Google Is Switching To Responsive Search Ads

Things are shifting all the time online, including the ways we are searching. According to Google, at least 15% of all search queries are never-before-seen searches. With responsive search ads, Google is trying to help brands keep up to date with these ever-changing trends and to always be where their audience is.

How To Prepare

For the time being, existing expanded text ads will be largely unaffected by the change. Though they cannot be edited, existing ads in this format will continue to run as normal. However, no new expanded text ads can be created.

To help you prepare for the upcoming change, Google recommends taking these steps:

  • Repurpose high-performing text ad content into responsive search ads and focus on improving ad strength.
  • Apply changes suggested in the account’s Recommendations
  • Pin headlines and other copy in specific positions to ensure they always show.
  • Use variations to test different ad versions.
  • Review assets in cross-campaign reporting based on performance to identify the most effective messaging.
  • Evaluate incremental growth in impressions, clicks and conversions at the ad group and campaign levels.

For more information, you can read the full announcement here.

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Google Shopping Ads Are Getting a “Swipeable” Makeover

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As part of its big Google Marketing Live event this week, the search engine announced a big makeover is coming to some shopping ads in the near future.

Initially limited to apparel-related shopping results, Google is revamping both online ads and organic listings to be more visually exciting and drive more engagement.

You can get a  preview of what to expect below:

Swipeable Google Shopping Ads

The revamp brings shopping ads more in-line with the more visual organic listings which have been rolling out since last year.

Google is accomplishing this using Search or Performance Max ad campaigns, though the images or graphics must be provided by advertisers.

As the company described the makeover:

“These will be clearly labeled as ads and will be eligible to appear in dedicated ad slots throughout the page. We’re also rolling out new ways to showcase multiple product images within Shopping ads in the U.S., along with information such as product descriptions, reviews, and product availability, with no further action required of advertisers.”

Though it is unclear when this revamp will be rolled out, advertisers should be excited by the more stylish and engaging presentation when it arrives.

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Google Gives Brands New Tools To Track Video Ads

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At TMO, we always prioritize being able to track marketing efforts and make actionable strategies to improve on what works. This is why we have always loved online ads like that Google provides, they offer detailed information on almost any type of ads you run. There’s just been one glaring exception – video ads.

Google Ad Manager has struggled to deliver deep or informative analytics for video ads since their launch on the platform. Thankfully, this is finally changing with the announcement of several new tools and data for video advertising.

New Tools For Measuring Video Ad Performance

Programmatic Video Health Tools

With the new Programmatic Video Health Tools feature, Google will deliver actionable opportunities for improvement immediately upon logging into your account.

This is done by assessing your video performance and measuring key metrics such as viewability, impressions, and revenue.

Additionally, Google is introducing another insights card for what it is calling Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) errors.

In this card, you’ll find broad details about the number of errors in your video inventory and what may be causing these errors.

Real-Time Reporting

Since problems with your ads can literally cost you, it is important to quickly spot issues and resolve them – especially when videos might involve live streams. 

To help with this, Google has introduced real-time video reporting to show detailed performance data in under 2 minutes. 

Additionally, the new YouTube ads delivery tool will include information on the delivery of YouTube Video Ads

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