Google and “Helpful content”: The advent of the censored and politically correct search engine

Back in 2011, Google rolled out an update called Panda that wanted to remove content farms. Sites and articles that are optimized solely for search engines to generate maximum advertising revenue without regard to “user experience” (this phrase is part of Google’s Torah and like all text of the Torah doesn’t mean much, but you can put anything in it).

11 years later in 2022, Google is going to roll an update called Helpful Content that has the same goal. That is to say that in 11 years, Google has absolutely do nothing against the bag of excrement that has become the web. The sites look like each other and everyone optimizes, optimizes and optimizes again to receive the precious blessing of advertising with mediocre content, pumped and recycled to the extreme. No wonder the mass media are the biggest proponents of this optimization.

The official goal of the first Google Panda was to fight “bad content”, but its real raison d’être was to decapitate the competition. Because its main targets was the comparison sites such as shopping sites or travel comparisons. In the United States alone, there are more than a hundred people who have committed suicide because Google had penalized, overnight, their site which allowed them to live. Once Google killed the competition with Panda, so he launched and promoted its Google Shopping and Google Flight services, but that must be a coincidence.

In 2022, Google no longer has any competition, as its successive napalm-based updates have cleared the way. However, organic traffic, ie information from search queries, has gone down the drain. With the advent of social networks and other media, it’s as if Google had a monopoly on horse-drawn carriages while everyone rides in cars. And the overwhelming majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. If advertisers go to other platforms, then its information monopoly is useless. When you see that in 2021, Tik Tok has become the most visited site ahead of Google, then you can say you have a problem.

Now, in this helpful content update that could be called Panda 2.0 or Granular Panda, Google believes that its algorithm is finer and that it will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. This update will be fully automatic, it will apply to the entire site and it will be almost impossible to correct a penalty. That is to say that this update will always analyze your content and assign it a score and if you do not have the average, then the whole site takes a decapitation in the face.

At the limit, Google is merciful and will allow you to restore the site, but it is not enough to correct the mediocrity of the offending article, but it takes constant effort over several months to prove to Google that you have been a good boy. Which makes it an impossible step, because Google will never tell you what’s wrong with your article and you’ll spend your time correcting. The requirements of helpful content according to Google are numerous and can be summarized by the following points:

• Do you have an existing or anticipated audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if it came directly to you?
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and in-depth knowledge (e.g. expertise that comes from actually using a product or service, or visiting a location)?
• Does your site have a main goal or purpose?
• After reading your content, will someone walk away feeling like they’ve learned enough about a topic to help them achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your content walk away feeling like they had a satisfying experience?
• Do you keep our tips for major updates and product reviews in mind?

To these main points, we can add these additional questions:

• Is the content primarily intended to attract searchers from search engines, rather than designed for humans?
• Do you produce a lot of content on different topics in hopes that some of them might perform well in search results?
• Do you use extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
• Do you mostly summarize what others have to say without adding much value?
• Do you write about things just because they seem trendy and not because you would write otherwise for your current audience?
• Does your content make readers feel like they need to search again for better information from other sources?
• Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
• Did you decide to enter a niche area with no real expertise, but mainly because you thought you were getting search traffic?
• Does your content promise to answer a question that doesn’t have an answer, like suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when it’s unconfirmed?

You would think these are legitimate questions and would clean up the web, but it didn’t work in 2011 and it never will. Because the very concept of helpful content is impossible to define. There are endless criteria by which a user might find this or that information useful. In fact on one of my sites, the most visited and most commented article on social networks does not even have text. It is simply a Nike shoe with a very different design. And it generated a ton of reactions.

Faced with the surge of Tik Tok, Instagram and Twitter, standard articles are falling apart. And that’s why, Google is increasingly using vertical results by embedding tweets, facebook posts or Youtube shorts to keep people on its platform. Apart from its search engine, Google has no other source of income. He doesn’t have a social network, Youtube makes him lose money and he says to himself that we are offering very smooth content, extremely consensual, this content will stand out from other formats, which is also intended to failure. And since it’s an algorithm, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage and SEO scammers are going to keep selling training for thousands of dollars on how to recover from Google’s update when they make mistakes spelling in their title…

Even if Google tells us that it will favor high quality content, written by experts, the very nature of its ecosystem favors the slavery of the pen. The sites’ advertising revenues have collapsed so much that there are no serious experts who want to write for free on the web. Either they join big companies or they switch to paid content. You can’t ask for an article of expertise and earn 50 dollars per month!

Google also does not like texts that are too complex or rich in vocabulary. Because today he tells us that you shouldn’t optimize your content for search engines, but he himself has hammered optimization for years by saying that you must optimize your content to have the visibility. An arsonist firefighter in all his glory.

Those who write for the web do not use French, English or any other language, because it is rather “algorithmic writing” as I say in my book on web writing, composed almost of onomatopoeia serving as keywords with a structure that exudes ugliness through every pore. So it’s Google that impoverished the web and it’s Google that generalized a written format as barbaric as that of prehistoric men based on grunts of consumerist pleasures and emotions all more stupid than each other.

The Consensus on Censorship and Politically correct

In addition, this update will also penalize approximate or false content. This poses the enormous problem of censorship. Because under the pretext of mediocrity, Google will suppress alternative opinions that are minority by nature. Because in addition to the “helpful content” update, you also have the consensus that lands on Featured Snippets. A featured snippet is when Google gives you the answer directly to a question by extracting it from a website without you having to go to it.

To improve featured snippets, Google will use “Consensus” which is that it will use multiple “authoritative, expert, and trusted” sources to determine if the answer is consensus. The ambition, in the words of Google, is to offer information literacy. Because yes, you see, we’re all too dumb to form our own opinions (another fascist idea) and Google will literate you so that you inform yourself correctly otherwise it’ll be a slap in the face.

You see it coming the big rip off, because it is simply outright censorship of all information that is not provided by the ruling caste. In fact, Google knows it’s been beaten down by social media and other platforms, but it hopes people will come to it to confirm something they’ve seen on Tik Tok. He still hasn’t understood how human nature works.

This consensus is also based on the “Fact Checkers” which are the most putrefied excrement in the septic tank of information. They are the ones who will say what is true or not on the web. And obviously the main criticism is that Google favors a Western-centric view. The majority of featured snippets languages ​​are Western with the exception of Japanese and Indonesian. But the Chinese and the Russians are not concerned and therefore, the Westerners will be able to puke at leisure on these two countries who make up the new world that is coming. We are still in the shit where Google wants 10% of humanity to continue dictating the way the remaining 90% think.

We can say that this update and the current trend of Google is that we will have a much more censored, totally politically correct web where the slightest error will be paid for in cash, because if you are penalized, then you no longer exist on the web. . Obviously, dissenting voices will always have other platforms to express themselves freely. The end result is that we will have several completely fragmented and hermetic webs where everyone will defend their own vision of the world.