Google's Helpful Content Update Is Sitewide; A Single Character Change Won't Help You

As a reminder, the Google helpful content system/update is a sitewide algorithm. It looks at your site as a whole when applying its ranking system to the Google Search results. So changing a character on one page of your site, won't do anything to help you recover from this Google ranking algorithm.

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, reiterated this on X by saying, "If the helpful content system used only a single character change on a single page to determine if an entire site has unhelpful content, there would be an issue with billions of helpful documents."

"It doesn’t work that way," Sullivan added.

Here are those posts:

If the helpful content system used only a single character change on a single page to determine if an entire site has unhelpful content, there would be an issue with billions of helpful documents. It doesn’t work that way. People are free to update their pages in ways that are…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 1, 2023

I figured I'd add one more story this week on the theme of the helpful content system, the others this week were:

• Google Helpful Content System Uses Machine Learning To Understand If Content Is Helpful
• Google: Stop Thinking What Should I Do For Google When Writing Content
• Google: Old Content Doesn't Make It Unhelpful Content
• Google To Recipe Bloggers: We've Heard Complaints, Ensure Key Parts Of Recipe Have Easy Access
• Google On Algorithm Updates: The "Web Changes. Content Changes. People's Expectations Change"

Happy writing!

Forum discussion at X.