Google will not roll back the September Helpful Content Update

While this one is quite obvious, it is still worth reporting that Google’s John Mu was asked if Google will roll back the September Helpful Content Update as it has had a devastating effect on most of the sites that we know about and it is said that this update has targeted the sites that were doing a lot of SEO which basically means that they were targeting the keywords that were bringing a lot of traffic regardless of the fact that the content was relevant to their site or not. This is obviously not what Google wants from websites as they clearly mention that your site should have content relevant to your niche.

John Mu’s answer to the above question was obviously that Google won’t roll back the helpful content update. The reason why it is obvious is because if Google rolls back the update then it means that they did some mistake with the update which has an effect on their reputation as well. If Google honestly thinks that they did something wrong with the update then they would roll back the changes in an update which will be pushed out later on but rolling back this update will do more harm than good for them.

This is also a trend we have seen with the last update as well where Google pushed up results from original sources as well as forums such as Reddit and Quora higher compared to websites answering the same questions as they feel the forums and official websites better answer those questions which is not the case always in reality.

John Mu’s comment on X reads “To be direct, I don’t see us rolling this update back. 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 that direction.” and mentions that “I’m sure there are cases where we get it wrong, and I’d love to have those examples if you can get them to me. That said, a lot of “authority” blogs are created by folks who didn’t even know which topic to pick beforehand, so I’d struggle to call them real authorities.”