Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has provided examples of unhelpful content types. He also provided examples of strategies writers may use to write unhelpful content. As a reminder, the general line of what is unhelpful content to Google is when you write to have that content rank well in search and not for your end users.

Danny Sullivan posted these on X saying, “Unhelpful content is content that’s generally written *for search engine rankings* and not for a human audience.”

As for the types of content that may be considered unhelpful to Google, he said, “if you wrote “20 fun things you can do today” because your *primary purpose* in doing so that you wanted to *rank well* for “fun things” rather than this being something you’d typically write about, that can be a sign you’re producing unhelpful content. It wasn’t something you wrote for you. It wasn’t something you wrote for your audience. It was something you wrote for search ranking purposes — and that often can align with unhelpful content.”

If you use techniques such as using tools to help you find what to write about, well that might lead to your content being considered unhelpful by Google. Danny Sullivan added, “I think the difficulty with tools like that is that it causes people to look too much at some “score” rather than the actual practices. It becomes, “well maybe if I change these words to that and add this to that” rather than “who, how and why” am I producing this content.”

“I wouldn’t want it to list some type of “score” like “you got 31 out of 50 questions right,” but instead maybe list the things missed to better highlight practices to reconsider or reexamine,” Sullivan added.

Then Simone de Vlaming asked how Google would know the purpose for someone to write and publish something. In which Danny Sullivan replied, “We look at signals across the web that are aligned with what people generally consider to be helpful content. If someone’s asking you a question, and you’re answering it — that’s people-first content and likely aligns with signals that it’s helpful.”

Here are those tweets:

If they’re faking things, they’re not aligning with our signals that seek to reward E-E-A-T content.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 24, 2023

We don’t somehow look for “unhelpful terms” — that’s not how it works. This explains what to focus on: https://t.co/NaRQqb1SQx

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 25, 2023

This was a really nice thread from @lilyraynyc about how it’s not a question if people aren’t working hard or putting time into content. It’s that the effort isn’t producing helpful people-first content: https://t.co/VXIp4kwqhA

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 24, 2023

What do you all think?

Forum discussion at X.