December 2022 Google Helpful Content Update Taking Longer, Said Google

Dec 21, 2022 - 7:51 am 25 by
Filed Under Google Updates

Google Helpful Content Waiting

Google's Search Liason, Danny Sullivan, said that the Google December 2022 helpful content update would take longer to roll out than originally expected. The update started to roll out on December 5th and was expected to finish earlier this week.

Google wrote on Twitter, "We are not" done yet rolling out the helpful content update. "While normally this update takes up to two weeks to complete, this one is going to take longer," Google added.

Here is that tweet:

John Mueller of Google added on Mastodon, "Sometimes things are a bit slow to roll out, it usually doesn't mean anything special." "Perhaps Googlebot is tied up crawling all those holiday cookies," he joked.

As a reminder, the Google helpful content update looks to weed out content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines that do not help or inform people. Google said this update will "tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines." The update will "help make sure that unoriginal, low-quality content doesn't rank highly in Search," Google added. So if you are writing content to drive search engine visibility and traffic, you might be hit by this type of update, and non-English sites are no longer safe from this update.

So far, it has been hard to pinpoint any specific ranking changes specific to the helpful content update. Maybe we will see some sort of big shuffle or volatility towards the tail-end of the update. Keep in mind, Google is also rolling out December 2022 link spam update, where we think we are seeing an impact.

As soon as it is over, Google will inform us, and I will post more over here, Search Engine Land and on social.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Updates

Record-Breaking Google Search Ranking Volatility Continues Into October

Oct 3, 2024 - 8:01 am
Bing Ads

Microsoft Advertising New Ad Experience, Diagnostics & Performance Snapshot

Oct 3, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Testing Search Instead For Section

Oct 3, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google

Google: SEOs Can Help Shape Client Policies & Decisions On AI Bots

Oct 3, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads With Images & Map Carousel

Oct 3, 2024 - 7:21 am
Bing Search

Happy 14th Birthday BingBot

Oct 3, 2024 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: New Google Ads Policy Disallows Promoting Content That Risks Harming Users, Googlers Or Google Ads