What does Google’s new ‘Useful Content’ algorithm mean for brands?

In August, Google has its ‘useful content’ algorithman update to its search process designed to boost content written for peoplewhile simultaneously devaluing content written primarily for SEO.

According to a announcement on Twitter the week before the rollout, the update would ‘ensure people see more original, useful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic.’ It’s worth noting that while in the past product review updates only targeted specific types of pages, the ‘useful content’ update was site-wide. The implications were, and still are, huge – because this change to the algorithm has the potential to have an impact everyone pages.

What were some of the implications of the update?

According to Google:

Any content—not just useless content—on sites that are determined to have relatively large amounts of useless content in general is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there’s other content elsewhere on the web that does better is to display. For this reason, the removal of useless content help the ranking of your other content.

In other words, the update introduced a whole new ranking signal to negatively score websites that publish a high volume of either low-value content or content otherwise deemed unhelpful to searchers.

While Google did give nominal notice about the changes to its search algorithm, a week was really no time at all to prepare. Businesses spanning every sector and every...