Google Won’t Roll Back Its Last Helpful Content Update

(CTN News) – Google’s John Mueller said it is unlikely the search company will reverse the last Google update, the September 2023 Google helpful content update. The update has been rolling out since September 14th, and has caused havoc for some SEOs.

In a post on X this morning, John stated, “I do not see a rollback happening. I agree that it is disappointing to see people put a lot of passion and effort into something and not see its full potential. However, things can be both heart-felt and not as helpful as the makers would like.”

“To be honest with you, I do not anticipate rolling back this update.” Also, none of this was done to spite anyone – we want to highlight fantastic, helpful, unique, compelling, “people-first” content in search, and we will continue to work on our algorithms to move in this direction.”

Apparently, Google is confident that this last iteration of helpful content is meeting its goals.

Can it do a better job than that? That is not what he is saying.

We still have a lot more work to do, as always. There is a lot of low-effort content online that people do not really want to find. There is also spam, and useless AI-generated content. Do you suggest we turn up the dials even further?”

But Google has more work to do, always, he replied, “No, we are not retiring and stopping work. There is always more to do. As user expectations grow and content is posted online in varying forms, separating the awesome from the mediocre is not always easy.

I’d like to take a break when AI can take over.

The Google spokesperson added that Google may make mistakes, “I am sure there have been instances when we have made mistakes, and I would appreciate receiving those examples if you could provide them.

Nevertheless, it is common for “authority” blogs to be written by individuals who did not know which topic to write about beforehand, so I would hesitate to refer to them as real authorities.”

There is more to come, such as surfacing hidden gems and pursuing hosted third-party content.

Be sure to stay tuned, more is on its way, but this rollout is not going to be reversed.

However, this helpful content update is doing what Google wanted it to do, for the most part, so you will recover when the next helpful content update rolls out, or when a core update rolls out, or if another unconfirmed Google search ranking update rolls out.

Until now, Google has not experienced a situation in which things went terribly wrong and a rollback was required.

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