In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom follows up on his previous blog post, The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Think, and provides actionable insights into what you can do if you’ve been impacted by this rollout. What should you do as a result of the HCU findings, and how can you think about your strategy moving forward?

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Happy Friday, Moz fans. Back in September, I published a piece of research on the Moz blog showing some interesting patterns around sites that had lost out in Helpful Content Updates.

Now previously, when both Google and the SEO industry in general have talked about Helpful Content Updates, we've mainly talked about onsite or page-level signals. What I found was a strong relationship with offsite signals. I'm not going to go too much into the research today. Probably that original post will be linked below.

What I do want to talk about is a lot of the discussion that I've been seeing since and on LinkedIn, on Twitter and other places, basically wondering what to take away from this. If you are a site that has already been hit by the Helpful Content Update, or perhaps you're worried that you might be, what can you do, what should you do as a result of these findings or sort of incorporating these findings into how you think about this?

So just to quickly recap, what I found was sites that had lost in the September 2023 and March 2024 Helpful Content Updates, the last one was merged with a core update, although I do think they're quite distinct signals, even though they're allegedly merged now. But anyway, the losers had pretty similar Domain Authority to sites that had been positively or not affected. But their Brand Authority was significantly lower on average, and as a result, their ratio of Domain Authority to Brand Authority was also very different.

Now interestingly, you'll note that the ratio of averages, the average Domain Authority and the average Brand Authority are not a factor of two separate, but the average of the ratios is a factor of two. As far as I know, this is a mathematical inevitability. But if someone wants to post a proof or a disproof somewhere, I'll give you an easy retweet. But that would be interesting to see. Anyway, I'm getting off-topic.

So what are we actually looking at here? So, for example, if I have a site where maybe my Domain Authority is pretty high, perhaps it's 80, but my Brand Authority is pretty low, perhaps it's 20, then I end up with a ratio of 4. A ratio of four suggests that I'm pretty likely, by no means certain, but pretty likely to be negatively affected by a Helpful Content Update, according to this research.

Now, obviously, neither Domain Authority nor Brand Authority are Google metrics. These are proprietary Moz metrics, but they are based on signals that Google has access to just as much, if not far more than we do. They're based on data that we get from SERPs, from crawling the web to get a link index, from search volume modeling. Google has access to all of these same kinds of signals. So it's not totally impossible that they could be doing something similar, and indeed we have seen them talk about it before, which I'll come back to in a moment.

But when we think about how these two signals, these two Moz metrics work, Domain Authority, primarily it's a site-level metric, which is based on links. The thing with links is they are a well-known lever that SEOs will try to pull. This is something that SEOs have been working with for a long time. Sites which have a lot of proactive link building can be said to have been like SEO'd or maybe even over-SEO'd. I don't really like that kind of terminology or using SEO as a verb, but bear with me for a second.

On the other hand, Brand Authority, this is more to do with demand that is clearly for your site, for your brand in search. It is much less common for SEOs to try to manipulate this kind of signal. It's also probably loosely correlated or better correlated than Domain Authority with traffic as well.

So this is not that dissimilar to, again, I'll reference a piece that I published in the past on the Moz blog a few months ago now, not that dissimilar to how we've sometimes seen Google talk about navigational search as a signal themselves. Indeed, I think this might be what they're referring to with the concept of a NavBoost query. I don't mean NavBoost the system, but specifically the term "NavBoost query" as it's used in some of their documents. It sounds a bit like we're talking about navigational search in this way. Anyway, that's an aside.

The point is if we've got a site that is very SEO'd but doesn't have much sort of non-SEO influenced presence, then perhaps we can say that the site is “over-SEO'd.” This is the same kind of signal that I've seen people like Cyrus talk about with onsite factors, that maybe sites which were over-SEO'd from an onsite perspective did poorly in the Helpful Content Updates. It's also the kind of thing that we've seen Google talk about in historic patents, where maybe they're interested in sites which are ranking better than they ought to be considering the size of the offline brand or the public interest in the site or business.

So what can we take away from this? Well, in terms of why Google might do this, I think Google gets a lot of negative press when SEO is seen to work in a sense. That's kind of a sad reality for us as SEOs. But you've seen a lot of stuff in the news, various sites over the years, I'm sure, the fact that this site is doing well is a sign that Google has failed because clearly they shouldn't be, this kind of a story.

It's also a very safe choice, particularly when Google is getting a lot of criticism or when they're worried about AI-written content, for example. It's a safe choice for Google to promote brands. No one is ever surprised to see a big brand high in their search results. So that's sort of Google's potential rationale here.

What should you not take away from what I'm saying here? So these are some things that I've seen people suggesting in comments on Twitter and this kind of place or X I should say. I still call it Twitter. But anyway, I've seen some people saying, "Oh, in this case, you should clearly disavow all your links so that you lower the ratio that way." I don't think that's right. There's a lot of question marks over what the Disavow tool even does these days. But even putting that to one side, I think this is more about you need a certain amount of real brand strength to fully benefit from your links. It's not adding more links has made your site rank worse. Or at least that's not my intuition here.

Don't say, "Oh, well, if this isn't a content signal, I can just write my unhelpful, thin, rubbish content, and it's all about the offsite stuff anyway. It doesn't matter what I put on my site." No, that's the wrong takeaway. Whether it's the Helpful Content Update or not, there's lots of reasons to think that having actually helpful content might help, not least people are going to have a better impression of your brand, more demand for your brand if your site typically has helpful content on it. Like one way or another, this is going to filter through.

Lastly, don't say, "Oh, well, if we think navigational search and branded search and brand demand as seen by Google and traffic, if we think all of these might be important, then clearly what I need to do is invest in click farms." That is not the right takeaway. I have no idea whether this can sometimes work. That is possible. But I'm pretty sure Google would have thought of this. They are deliberately using a signal here in the form of traffic, as seen in Chrome and other browsers, that they have a pretty good ability to regulate and to spot manipulation. I don't think it would be difficult for Google to detect a click farm, basically. So yeah, I don't think this is the right takeaway. It's probably a waste of your money.

What should you do? Diversify, and by that, I mean marketing channels. It's not just that if you are invested in other marketing channels and your SEO suddenly takes a nosedive, you've got those as insurance policies. It's also that those channels are going to generate interest in your site, which will help you in SEO. So it's a double benefit.

Invest in product. This is another thing that a lot of SEOs don't like to acknowledge or get involved in. But ultimately, the success of your product is a big part of your success in search, particularly for larger brands and for more competitive niches. Again, if people like what you're doing, if they're trying to seek you out, that has SEO benefits.

Lastly, public relations and top of funnel. This is, again, trying to build demand and interest in your brand. It's trying to get to the point where if people don't see you in the search, they're going to follow it up with a search for your site so that Google eventually is forced to show you. This is the opposite of being over-SEO'd. This is you get to the point where however good or bad your SEO is, you can imagine some sites are always going to rank. Maybe you're not ever going to be the Financial Times or Amazon or whatever, but you want to be moving in that direction to having the sort of interest in your demand that means that Google is always going to rank you, and you're not the kind of site that they're targeting with these updates.

Anyway, I hope this has given you some good food for thought. Thank you very much for watching, and see you in the next Whiteboard Friday.