Note – this is from my notes and is not the most recent information from Google!
I was just going through my notes to look for some specific SEO tests that I was doing back in June and noticed that its been sitting there. Because not that many other SEO professionals have specifically reported about it already I thought I should!
During SMX Advanced conference in June this year – Barry Schwartz interviewed Googler Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Management, Search.
Even though there were many interesting things which they discussed some of which were covered by Danny Goodwin in Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable also covered these.
From 12:07 Elizabeth in the interview goes on to say this …
The other thing that we did is we made some really big updates to multiple core systems.
Now, the the beginning of this was, a lots of genuine user complaints about certain types of really unsatisfying low quality, unhelpful content this began in 2022 with our helpful content update and what we saw over time is that while the helpful content update was very successful and reducing the amount of that low quality unsatisfying content,
we actually did a lot of work to understand why were we showing this content in the first place?
You know, we have powerful core ranking systems that do heavy lifting in Search and try to get those really great satisfying results. What was going on.
And so, using the ideas, the signals all the insights that we gained from the helpful content update.
We then examined, our core systems. We found ways to improve them, we found ways to bring signals in.
We did some re-architecture work, so that we could do a much better job of showing helpful content.
And after all of this work, you know, as we posted, we got about a 45 percent decrease in the amount of unhelpful unsatisfying content, we were showing.
You know, obviously this was a lot of work, it was a lot of changes.
We made a lot of changes to a bunch of different core systems.
We had to roll this out carefully.
She clearly said that helpful content update was a success in reducing the amount of low quality unsatisfying content in search results but caught my eye is her saying “we actually did a lot of work to understand why were we showing this content in the first place?“
Then continue to say that “we have powerful core ranking systems that do heavy lifting in Search and try to get those really great satisfying results. What was going on.“
And then Google used ideas, signals all the insights which they gained from the helpful content update. And examined their otherwise powerful (as Elizabeth said) ranking systems and Google found ways to improve them and “we found ways to bring signals in” said Elizabeth.
Which lead to Google doing some re-architecture work of core ranking systems with goal to doing much better job of showing helpful content. And then Elizabeth continues to say “We made a lot of changes to a bunch of different core systems.“
So all in all – Google learned something from helpful content system/updates and used that knowledge to debug their otherwise powerful core ranking systems to understand why they were showing unhelpful content at first place & then fix the architecture of different core systems.
BUT?? as I wrote in my 2024 SEO wrap.
Google on 28th and 29th October organised a creator summit in their SF office. 20 site owners who were impacted by Helpful Content Update (HCU) in Sep 2023 were invited to this summit for talking with Google Engineers and provide feedback. But this event was a total disaster I think.
Because essentially Google told everyone attending that they will not recover and its time for them to move.
While there were some key takeaways and learnings too! But all in all this was a total disaster!!
One of the key quote from Google that came up from this summit was that Googler Danny Sullivan sat with engineers and they weren’t able to figure out why some pages aren’t ranking!
Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren't they showing up and they did their "debugging process" and couldn't figure it out.
— Morgan (@CharlestonCraft) October 30, 2024
the robots are winning.
Now this and what Elizabeth Tucker said in the interview seems like two ends of same story!
One where Google is both spending time understanding why their otherwise powerful core ranking systems were showing unhelpful content and then Google doing some architecture work to improve those systems (eventually leading to merging of helpful content system with core systems).
What do you think of one side
Googlers debugging the core ranking systems and figuring out why they were showing unhelpful content? Then doing some architecture work across multiple systems to improve them?
And on another side Googlers not be able to debug why some otherwise helpful content from a site hit by HCU sep 2023 isn’t ranking?
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