DISC Inc

“Although the Helpful Content Update did not impact most sites, it could be the case with the Google Core Update that is currently rolling out. If you have other quality issues as well as unhelpful content, the combination may be enough to cause a loss of traffic.”

Released on Sept. 12, it took two full weeks to roll out. And it came three days after the helpful content update finished rolling out on Sept. 9. Rollout complete. According to Google’s search ranking update page, “The rollout was complete as of September 26, 2022.” The page seems to have been updated about an hour ago. September 2022 Core Update impact. Based on data from tracking tools, the September 2022 core update hit fast, but was less impactful than previous updates. While there was some rank volatility, the consensus was that it was weaker than past Google core updates.

As Alan Kent of Google recently said on Twitter “a merchant’s product page with user reviews is not considered a “product review page” in this context.”

Identify product reviews. Google also recently clarified that structured data may help Google identify product review-type content, but it is one of many ways Google identifies such content. Danny Sullivan wrote, “as for structured data, it might help us better identify if something is a product review, but we do not solely depend on it.”

As a reminder, only 20% of SEOs said they noticed any ranking changes related to the helpful content update and I believe a good percentage of that 20% are confused

After cross referencing with the monthly search volume for these questions, she added some of these as H3s within the guide to see how they would perform. They resulted in so much more traffic that she decided they warranted their own individual guides, hence the idea for the hub. This would mean we weren’t putting all of our eggs into one basket, and that we could also internally link all of them together for users wanting to read more. Users that are further down the marketing funnel don’t want to scroll down a huge guide to find the answer to their specific question, and we were certain that this would positively affect bounce rate. We therefore made sure that nine times out of 10, the H1 contained the question that was being answered.

the content hub

Google featured snippet callouts, the word or words called out above the featured snippet in a larger font, now can be powered by MUM (which is a new and rare use of MUM in search) to check what other sources are saying about the topic. Google said, "our systems can check snippet callouts against other high-quality sources on the web, to see if there's a general consensus for that callout, even if sources use different words or concepts to describe the same thing."

Understand the questions in People Also Ask boxes. Notice how Google talks about having to search after a search to find answers? How else will you know what searchers ask for next?

Use trends, PAA clues, and news to drive your questions and ask them what they think.