Google is now penalising sites for publishing ‘unhelpful’ content. Will your page rankings suffer?

Big news in the SEO world. Google has released a new, site-wide ranking signal that rewards sites that publish satisfying content and penalises those that don’t.

According to Google Search Central Blog, the update — fittingly called the ‘helpful content’ update — begins this week; however, it could take up to two weeks to roll out completely.

Google has laid down the ground rules, stating that content must take a ‘people-first’ approach to achieve or maintain a favourable search ranking. Content that is created to oblige search engines first on the other hand may take a significant hit. In short, Google will delineate between content that’s created to rank over content that’s created to help users.