Lily Ray, Sr. SEO Director and Head of Organic Research at Amsive, shares the latest from Google at PubCon 2023 in Austin, TX. With Google’s new Helpful Content Update, search marketers are forced to reconsider the value of every single piece of content on their site. Looking at content through the lens of Google Panda, E-A-T and Needs Met from the Google Rater Guidelines, and the new Helpful Content Update, learn how to analyze current content on a scale of helpfulness, how to make the tough decisions on content to remove, and how to read between the lines of all Google’s content related documentation to create the types of content Google wants to see ranking at the top of the search results.

1. A deep dive into the
latest Google updates

2. Sr. Director, SEO &
Head of Organic Research
Lily Ray

3. Pubcon Speaker
What they thought they’d be
speaking about in 2022…
AI

4. 2023
AI dropped the
atomic bomb

5. Don’t worry, I’ll be talking about AI.
But first…the other Google updates.

6. Ranking ‘systems,’
not updates

7. BERT Crisis information Deduplication Exact match domain
Freshness Helpful content
Link analysis &
PageRank
Local news
MUM Neural matching Original content
Removal-based
demotion
Page experience Passage ranking Rankbrain Reliable information
Site diversity Spam detection
Google’s Active Ranking Systems

8. Systems
(may be constantly operating)
Updates
(to systems)

9. Product Review System
& Updates*
Product review
system introduced
Updates to
product review
system
* Plus February 2023

10. Helpful
Content
System

11. Launched in
August 2022

12. Helpful Content System
Updated in December

13. Created a new sitewide signal:

14. What the classifier looks for…
“In search of content with little
value, low-added value, or that is
not particularly helpful”
speak
actually
What
means:
SEO spam

15. If the majority of
site content is
“unhelpful”…
…even for “helpful” content.

16. The (un)helpful
content classifier:
o Is automated
o Uses machine learning
o Runs continuously
o Is not a manual action
o Can affect a site at any time
o Can be “lifted” after unhelpful
content is removed

17. Who was impacted?

18. Categories Impacted
Lyrics sites
Adult sites
Grammar sites
Travel blogs
Low-quality affiliate sites
Product manuals (duplicate content)
Aggregator sites
Guitar chords

19. Rapid Growth Before Decline
Many affected sites exhibit this pattern…

20. What does the
"unhelpful content"
look like?

21. Keyword
Drops for
1 Affected
Site

22. Articles With Thin Reviews of Products

23. Lists of “Top _#__ Best _____ ”

24. “Things to Do”
Travel Articles
(with Affiliate Links)

25. Tech Content
VPN comparisons,
MP3 downloads,
How to delete Instagram/Twitter

26. An entire network taken down by HCU

27. Found 1 site affected
by the HCU…

28. How deep does
the rabbit hole go?

29. Which turned into uncovering a network of 17 niche
sites all affected by the Helpful Content Update
0.
0.75
1.5
2.25
3.
May 22 June 2022 July 2022 Aug 2022 Sept 2022 Oct 2022 Nov 2022 Dec 2022 Jan 2023
SEO visibility

30. What are the 17 sites doing?
o Thousands of articles with mediocre content
o Trying to cover every topic within the niche, but
lacking true E-E-A-T
o Most articles start with “what is”
o Venturing into topics outside of its wheelhouse
(art or music site writing about health)
o Excessive interlinking between sites in network
o Stock photos only
o Aggressive ads and affiliate links
o Lying about readership statistics &
mentions in major brands (no evidence)
o Fake E-E-A-T signals e.g. “Fact Checked”
labels and (possible) fake authors

31. What are the
sites doing?
EXAMPLE CATEGORY PAGE

32. Every site’s ‘About’ page contains these (fake) stats and this stock photo:

34. Helpful content update
takeaways:
what doesn’t work?

35. Sites pretend to be
experts on too
many topics

36. Information is
generic without
unique or
expert insights

37. Information
lacks detail
or specificity

38. Content velocity and
topic selection seem
to reflect an “SEO-
first” approach

39. Overwhelming ads and
affiliate links
(correlation, not causation)

40. Other important
updates & takeaways

41. December updates to
Quality Rater Guidelines

42. Big Updates to QRG & E-E-A-T in December 2022

43. Experience
Expertise
Expertise
Expertise vs. Experience

44. Waiting for the next update:
quality raters are busy

45. Remember: we haven’t
seen the full manifestation
of the new “Experience”
signal in the algorithms yet

46. How does AI fit in?

47. AI Content Experiment
• Published brand new niche site
• Scraped relevant People Also Ask
questions & used GPT3 API to answer
across ~10k URLs
• Added a few links from other sites

48. AI Content Experiment: Results
@thetafferboy

49. AI Content Experiment: Results
Crawled, not indexed
@thetafferboy

50. AI Content Experiment: Results
@thetafferboy

51. It works until it doesn’t.

52. What does Google say about AI?
We finally have answers:

53. What did Google say? TL;DR:
o It is original and high-quality
o It demonstrates E-E-A-T
o It satisfies the Helpful Content System
o It doesn’t propagate misinformation
o It isn’t created with the primary purpose of
manipulating search results
AI content can be fine if:

54. Google also
recommends listing
author names for content
when the reader might
ask “who wrote this?”
However, there are 3 important caveats:
Google recommends
disclosing to the reader
when AI was used in
the content creation
process.
Google recommends
against listing AI as
the “author” of the
content.

56. 43% of authors do not want to disclose AI content alongside their name

57. Google is quietly
getting better at
knowing who
authors are

58. Let’s not forget these Google patents…
Agent Rank Author Vectors
Speaker
Identification
Identifying
Authoritative
Results
Website
Representation
Vectors

59. Takeaways
o Helpful content requires effort
o Taking shortcuts can catch up to you
o Instead of focusing on scale, focus on
content quality and E-E-A-T
o Stay in your lane
o Invest in your authors’ online reputation &
build out their Knowledge Graphs

60. Lily Ray
@lilyraynyc

61. Appendix

62. Core Updates

63. Let’s talk about
search intent.

64. 1.Transactional 2.Navigational 3.Informational
SEOs always talk about the “3 search intents”

65. Let’s be real. There are way more than 3 intents in SEO.

66. More accurate list of actual search intents:
o Buying the product
o Reading product reviews
o Finding local businesses & activities
o Seeing recent news
o Fact checking
o Defining the word or phrase
o Tutorials & troubleshooting
o Finding stock photos
o Recipes
o Medical symptoms
o Researching reputation
o Finding government/authoritative resources
o Seeing pictures
o Booking a trip
o Watching a video
o Hearing a song
o Translating a phrase
o Spell check
o How to
o Lyrics
o Adult videos/images

67. Core updates
often reflect
large-scale
intent changes