This is a preview of Chapter 8 from my new ebook – Strategic SEO 2025 – a PDF which is available to download for free here.
Recently, we’ve watched Google wage war on what it calls “search engine-first content.” This reminds me of other wars – like Panda, Phantom or Penguin and unnatural links.
In simple terms, this is content created primarily to rank high on Google rather than to genuinely help readers.
We’ve all encountered it – those webpages stuffed with keywords and generic fluff that leave you unsatisfied.
Google itself defines search engine-first content as material “created primarily to rank high in search results rather than to benefit the reader” Google.
In contrast, people-first content is made with the audience’s needs in mind.
Why Google Targeted “Search Engine-First” Content
By 2022, frustration with low-value, SEO-driven content had reached a boiling point.
Users were complaining that search results often led to unoriginal pages designed just to attract clicks, not inform.
A popular hack at the time was appending “reddit” to Google searches to find authentic user discussions instead of thin blog posts – a clear sign of dissatisfaction.
Google took notice:
“We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers,” one Google announcement explained theverge.com.
In August 2022, Google responded with a major algorithm change, pointedly named the Helpful Content Update.
Its purpose was to “make sure that unoriginal, low-quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search”, and instead reward content “made specifically by and for people” theverge.com.
In other words, Google set out to demote the search engine-first pages clogging its results – those listicles and aggregators adding no unique value – and promote websites offering original, satisfying information.
“Content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines – what you might call ‘search engine-first content’ – has been frequently written about lately and discussed across social media. In short, searchers are getting frustrated when they land on unhelpful webpages that rank well because they were designed to rank well.” – Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (summarising Google’s view) searchengineland.com
Google’s own spokespeople have been very vocal in promoting this people-first philosophy.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, emphasised that Google wants to reward helpful content above all. “Quality signals – like helpfulness – matter more,” hobo-web.co.uk.
The message from Google is clear: pages created just to game SEO, without real expertise or value, are increasingly likely to be filtered out.
Their automated systems now ask, “Who, How, and Why” for each piece of content – who made it, how it was created, and why (was it to genuinely help users, or just to rank?): developers.google.com.
Content that fails these sniff tests is prone to be flagged as unhelpful.
In fact, Google explicitly warns creators to “avoid creating search engine-first content” and provides self-assessment questions as red flags.
For example: “Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?”; “Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?”; “Are you mainly summarizing what others have said without adding much value?” developers.google.comdevelopers.google.com.
Answering yes to questions like these is a sign that a page was made for search rankings rather than readers – precisely what Google’s new updates target.
The Helpful Content Update (HCU)
Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) launched in late August 2022 and has been updated several times since.
It marked one of the most significant search algorithm changes in a decade searchengineland.com. To understand its impact, let’s look at the key milestones of HCU and what each brought:
- August 2022 – Initial Launch: Rolled out for English searches globally. This update introduced a new site-wide ranking signal to identify and devalue websites with a high amount of unhelpful, “search engine-first” content: Google’s goal was to “help searchers find high-quality content” by rewarding pages “written for humans” and downgrading those written solely to rank. Early communication from Google stressed that this was an “ongoing effort” to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content on the web: searchengineland.com.
- December 2022 – Global Expansion: The helpful content system was expanded beyond English to cover all languages globally hobo-web.co.uk. Google also improved its classifier’s ability to detect low-quality content. (Notably, this December HCU update took 4–5 weeks to fully roll out, indicating the scale of the change.) By this point, webmasters in all regions needed to ensure their sites weren’t filled with SEO-first filler content.
- September 2023 – Refinements: Google rolled out another HCU update with some important tweaks. It clarified that using AI or automation without oversight could be risky, and warned against posting content from third parties “without adding value” – reinforcing that simply republishing or aggregating content isn’t considered helpful hobo-web.co.uk. Google also provided more guidance on recovery, acknowledging site owners’ concerns. (Interestingly, around this time, Google softened its stance on AI-generated content if it was helpful and met its guidelines, focusing less on the how and more on the quality of the result.)
- March 2024 – Integration into Core Algorithm: A major turning point came when Google fully integrated the helpful content system into its core ranking algorithm. HCU was no longer a one-off update but an always-on part of how Google ranks pages. Google’s search engineers reported that these efforts had already led to a significant purge of unhelpful material online – roughly a 40–45% reduction in low-quality content showing up in search results: searchengineland.com and hobo-web.co.uk. In short, nearly half of the shallow “made for SEO” stuff had been swept aside (according to Google’s measurements) by early 2024. Google also introduced new spam-fighting policies in tandem, underscoring that trustworthiness and transparency are crucial for content to be deemed helpful. Sullivan put it plainly: the helpful content system is now a “core ranking system that’s assessing helpfulness” across all types of searches – a permanent part of Google’s DNA moving forward.
It’s worth noting that HCU was designed as a site-wide signal from the start: searchengineland.com.
If a large portion of your website is filled with unhelpful content made just for search engines, your entire site can be held back in Google’s rankings.
This made the update especially scary for publishers – even your good pages could be dragged down if Google determined that your site, overall, was guilty of producing too much fluff.
Still, the exact mechanics remain opaque. What’s clear is that Google expects a “people-first” focus site-wide, not just a few high-quality pages masking a pile of SEO spam.)
Who was most likely to get hit? Google initially pointed out a few content areas that “may be impacted the most”: online education, arts & entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.
These were niches where, historically, creators churned out articles mainly to rank – think of thin “how-to” posts, auto-generated lyrics or synopsis sites, product roundup blogs written by affiliates, etc.
Sure enough, many affiliate marketing sites, generic how-to blogs, and content farms saw their traffic plummet once HCU rolled out.
Meanwhile, genuine expert sites and community forums (even Reddit threads) began to rise higher for certain queries, aligning with Google’s goal of surfacing unique information you haven’t seen before.
In Google’s eyes, this was a net win for searchers.
But for many site owners, especially small businesses relying on content marketing, the real story of HCU was just beginning – and it wasn’t a happy one.
Impact on Small Businesses and Publishers
From my vantage point, with access to many HCU hit sites that I took on to analyse after HCU hit, the impact of the Helpful Content updates on a particular type of site has been devastating.
Almost immediately after the first HCU in 2022, forum threads and social media lit up with stories of traffic crashes.
Many of these were small or medium-sized sites that had invested heavily in content creation as a marketing strategy.
A lot of affiliate bloggers and niche informational sites (the kind run by solo entrepreneurs or small teams) were particularly hard hit.
Google effectively declared that much of this content wasn’t up to snuff in terms of authenticity or value, and the algorithms dealt out harsh punishment in the rankings.
All across the world, small businesses and indie publishers are reeling from HCU’s effects.
On SEO communities, you’ll find countless reports of sites that lost 20%, 50%, even 90% of their organic traffic after being deemed “unhelpful.”
Some were thin-content sites churning out articles on every trending topic – arguably deserving of a hit.
But others were heartfelt projects by subject enthusiasts or entrepreneurs trying to share knowledge while earning a living.
This, it has been claimed, is alarming for web diversity.
Small businesses feel they’re being squeezed out, not necessarily because their content is bad, but possibly because they lack the brand authority signals that Google now heavily favours (as I discussed earlier).
Morgan, a creator from the site Charleston Crafted, described the disconnect felt by many at the Google Creator Summit.
She felt Google’s representatives acknowledged the quality of their work, but then offered solutions that missed the mark. Morgan testified, “You have good content. You are good creators…. But they really wanted to go off on different tangents about setting up a profile or getting you verified.” She expressed her frustration, stating, “I feel they were going down the wrong trail… a Google Profile, a bio….”
This perfectly captures the feeling that Google was focusing on surface-level identity signals while publishers felt their core content was being ignored.
It is worth noticing that… “Google profile, a bio”…. Comment.
This ties in with entity SEO best practices.
A Hard Road to Recovery (Or None at All)
“Fix” is hard to say when it comes to relevancy, but I’d assume bigger changes would be visible when the next CORE UPDATES happen.” John Mueller, Google
When your website gets dinged by the Helpful Content system, how easy is it to recover?
By Google’s design, and from what I’ve witnessed, not very easy.
In fact it can signal the death knell for your site.
The collective sentiment of the affected community is powerfully captured in questions posed in online forums.
One publisher asked, “Assuming a site hit by HCU in 2023 has fixed everything that caused the sitewide classifier to be applied, what is the timeframe for the site to start climbing again?” This was followed by the more desperate and widely shared observation: “We are many that would really love a reply to why not a single HCU-hit site has begun climbing again and why new articles won’t rank.”
The “helpful content” classifier that labels a site as unhelpful can stay in effect for months or years even after you improve your pages.
Google intentionally made this signal persistent in order to discourage quick-and-dirty fixes.
In practice, many site owners hit by HCU have found themselves in a long game of waiting – or a hopeless spiral of no recovery at all – as I warned a few of them in November 2024 and in my February 2025 article when I first looked into the HCU impact on small publishers.
Google’s official line is that sites can recover if they significantly improve content quality, but “returning to pre-update levels isn’t realistic” in many cases.
John Mueller, a Google Search advocate, bluntly stated that if a site was heavily affected, simply fixing a few things wouldn’t bounce it back to where it was.
According to Mueller, these aren’t quick technical penalties you can lift; rather, they often require fundamental changes to a site’s approach. “These are not ‘recoveries’ in the sense that someone fixes a technical issue and they’re back on track – they are essentially changes in a business’s priorities,” Mueller explained hobo-web.co.uk.
In other words, a website that thrived on search engine first content might need to completely rethink its strategy (and even its business model) to align with what Google now wants.
That’s a very bitter pill to swallow for a small business that, say, built its audience over the years by writing lots of search-optimised articles.
Google is basically saying: “Your old approach won’t cut it anymore. It’s not just one thing to fix – you might have to overhaul your whole content philosophy.”
This stance was highlighted in late 2024, when Google took the step of inviting some affected publishers to a private “Web Creator Summit.”
The company ostensibly wanted to hear out those who had been “strongly impacted” by HCU and discuss solutions.
Unfortunately, by many accounts, that meeting only heightened publishers’ frustrations.
Several attendees reported that Google’s representatives acknowledged the publishers had good content, but “Google’s systems could not detect that” and thus treated them as low-quality mariehaynes.com and mariehaynes.com. Perhaps most infuriating was the lack of a hopeful timeline: Google offered “little hope… for recovery any time soon”.
In fact, when one affected site owner asked Google’s Danny Sullivan what he would do if he had a website hit by the helpful content update, Sullivan’s response was astonishingly candid.
He said, “I’d do something else in the meantime.” In other words, don’t count on Google search traffic returning – go work on other channels or projects.
According to another attendee, Google’s advice was even more blunt: “If you were hit by HCU, do not expect a recovery anytime soon. Move on.”See Marie Haynes’ research here: mariehaynes.com.
You can imagine how demoralising it is for a small business owner to be told by Google to essentially give up on the organic search traffic they’d lost.
Telling a business to just forget about that lost traffic (which may have been their main source of customers), no matter how pragmatic, felt a little tone-deaf.
The data on recoveries backs up Google’s pessimism.
By late 2023, only a minority of sites had seen any rebound. SEO analyst Glenn Gabe tracked roughly 400 websites that were hit hard by the September 2023 HCU update.
He found that after a full year, which included multiple core updates and another helpful content tweak, only 22% of those sites had managed even a modest 20% or greater increase in organic traffic seroundtable.com.
Gabe reported, noting that “most [sites] saw no lifts at all.” Even among the “recoveries,” many were partial and volatile (a surge during one Google update, then a drop off in the next) seroundtable.com.
Full restoration to pre-2022 traffic levels was “an anomaly,” Gabe observed – essentially a rare lucky case.
And tellingly, a portion of sites continued to decline even further with subsequent updates seroundtable.com. This paints a grim picture: once labelled unhelpful, a site often stays in the dog house.
Some webmasters have thrown in the towel, either pivoting their sites to entirely different topics, or abandoning projects altogether because they “can’t afford to continue… with no traffic”: seroundtable.com.
From Google’s perspective, this slow or non-existent recovery is not a flaw – it’s by design.
They want to permanently discourage the kind of content strategies that HCU targeted.
But from the small business perspective, it feels like being hit by a truck.
There’s a growing sentiment that Google is abandoning smaller sites.
As one attendee at the summit summed it up, Google basically told them “there’s nothing wrong with your sites, it’s us” – meaning the search algorithm had changed in ways that collateral damage was inevitable – and that they (Google) didn’t really know how to fix it for those edge cases.
That admission, “we can’t give you any guarantees”, coupled with “that is not going to change”, was a little chilling.
It means that even good content can fall through the cracks of Google’s system, and Google’s best advice is to keep improving or find other avenues, because the dominance of “people-first” signals is here to stay.
Highlighting the grim reality of HCU’s impact, creator Mike Hardaker stated bluntly, “We’re now 13 months since the HCU update rolled out, I don’t believe a single website has recovered.”
This sentiment was echoed by another publisher, who, according to your research, was told by Google that his “content was not the issue.”
This creates a powerful contradiction: if the content isn’t the problem and yet no one is recovering, it points directly to a deeper, more fundamental issue.
The E-E-A-T Factor
Google also tied the helpful content effort to its broader quality guidelines known as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
In Google’s view, trustworthiness is the foundation of content quality hobo-web.co.uk.
That means who is creating the content, and why, matters a great deal. Pages that don’t clearly indicate authorship, or sites that hide who is responsible for the content, inherently lack trust in Google’s eyes and are unlikely to be deemed “helpful”.
This is one reason many small affiliate sites may have gotten hit – they often were made to look generic, with no real author bios or brand identity, just a factory of SEO articles.
Google now strongly encourages adding accurate authorship information to establish trust for both the site (which can be the Primary Author too) and the creator.
If a website fails to demonstrate transparency about its creators and purpose, “it completely violates Google’s helpfulness standard – full stop,” as I’ve written before on hobo-web.co.uk.
In fact, Google’s algorithms can sometimes judge a site as untrustworthy before even analysing the specific page content, simply because the site doesn’t meet basic E-E-A-T markers (for instance, an “About Us” page, author credentials, etc.).
This focus on trust and expertise is something many supporters of HCU applaud – it raises the bar for professionalism in content.
Small businesses that treated their site as a serious publication, showcasing real expertise and credentials, tend to fare better than those that cranked out cookie-cutter blog posts anonymously.
Even some of the initially sceptical SEOs have come around to the idea that Google’s approach forces better content creation practices.
The era of tricking your way to the top with SEO gimmicks is fading. As an industry, SEO is (painfully) being reminded that serving the user should be priority number one.
There’s a renewed emphasis on first-hand experience in content – something Google explicitly rewards.
For example, Google hinted that for travel queries, they’d prefer content by people who have actually visited the places they write about..
If you’re a small travel business that actually goes on tours and shares unique photos and stories, you, theoretically, have a better chance now against a faceless travel affiliate site.
That’s encouraging for genuine small operators, but it’s a seismic shift in who is expected to create content in 2025.
A rule of thumb for me is whoever created a type of content today might not be who is creating that type of content tomorrow.
Furthermore, some observers note that user satisfaction with Google results has improved after these updates.
Google itself claims that thanks to HCU (and related changes), searchers are 40% less likely to land on unhelpful pages now searchengineland.com.
And remember that “Reddit hack” for getting better results?
Google’s tweaks in late 2022 were seen as “particularly helpful to anyone using the append ‘reddit’ trick”, theverge.com – meaning Google started surfacing more real user forum content and authentic reviews on its own.
In fact, queries for many products began to automatically show a “Discussions” section or even Reddit links, indicating Google’s algorithms were actively boosting community content where appropriate.
We can only trust it has little to do with any financial agreements Google has with Reddit (although that in itself is a big concern for many).
The Future of Content and Small Businesses
The advent of the Helpful Content system has undoubtedly reshaped the SEO landscape.
On the one hand, search engine-first content and non-transparent entities are being purged from Google SERPs for the betterment of user experience, and that’s hard to argue against.
Small businesses that have true expertise and that publish high-quality, authentic content can still thrive; in fact, they have a better shot at standing out now if they do things right.
On the other hand, many legitimate small publishers have been caught in the crossfire.
Their plight has been voiced by some of the most vocal critics of HCU.
Content creators at the summit outright told Google that “there was nothing wrong with our sites” – the content was good, but Google’s algorithms simply didn’t surface it.
Google’s response has been unsatisfying to say the least, essentially: we’re focused on what users want, and we’re not turning back.
For small business owners who built their success on Google Search, that feels like the rules of the game changed suddenly, and the referee won’t hear an appeal.
Some critics have gone as far as suggesting ulterior motives.
They point out that Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising.
If organic (free) visibility becomes harder for small businesses, where will those businesses turn?
Likely to Google Ads, spending money to regain exposure. It’s a cynical take, but not unheard of.
Small businesses need to adapt. The age of easy SEO traffic by pumping out lots of mediocre articles is over.
To succeed now, you truly have to put users first in your content strategy, just as Google has been preaching.
That means focusing on your niche expertise, demonstrating your experience, being transparent about who you are, and genuinely answering the questions your audience has (better than anyone else).
It also means diversifying – relying solely on Google traffic is risky if an algorithm can wipe you out overnight.
We’ve seen creators (including myself) exploring alternatives like social media, newsletters, or even other search platforms.
Interestingly, as Google squeezes some types of content, users are exploring things like AI chatbots (ChatGPT) or community sites for answers.
The competition for how people find information is heating up, and Google’s moves might inadvertently drive some users elsewhere if its results favour only big players or too many ads.
Google’s crusade against search-engine-first content – embodied by the Helpful Content Update and related changes – has profoundly impacted the web ecosystem.
It’s cleaned up a lot of spam and pushed creators to be better, but it has also left many small businesses feeling like collateral damage.
I want the web to be filled with helpful, authentic content (and I support Google’s goal there). Yet I’ve also witnessed business owners in distress because an update slashed their traffic by 80% and they’re not sure how to pay their bills now.
The balance between improving search quality and not stifling the little guys is a delicate one.
Google, for its part, appears firm: people-first content is the future, and there’s no reversal in sight. “I expect if we see incremental improvements, that might be reflected in incremental ranking changes,” Danny Sullivan said – meaning recovery, if it comes, will be slow and earned hobo-web.co.uk.
In other words, adapt and improve steadily, or risk fading away.
As we move forward, small businesses and content creators must take these lessons to heart.
The ones who survive and thrive will be those who genuinely align with what Google’s trying to reward: unique expertise, trustworthiness, and true helpfulness to users.
It’s not an easy path – and it’s certainly not always “fair” in the short term – but it is the new reality of SEO we have to deal with.
In my view, search engine-first content had its run (and made plenty of money for some), but people-first content is the only sustainable strategy now for anyone who publishes on the web.
The only other option I can think of in terms outside of people-first content is ironically AI-targeted content – Content made for AI with AI, which I go into in my article: Optimise for the Synthetic Content Data Layer Opportunity Gap.
The challenge for small businesses is to embrace this ethos without losing their livelihoods in the transition.
And the challenge for Google is to continue refining its systems so that truly great, user-focused content – even from the smallest sites – gets the visibility it deserves, while the cheats and the spam fade into history – while at the same time, deal with the accusation from many quarters is that it is killing the open web.
The story is still unfolding, and as an SEO, I’ll be watching (and adjusting) every step of the way.
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