December 2022 Google Useful Content material Replace Taking Longer Than Anticipated

Google’s Search Liason, Danny Sullivan, said that the Google December 2022 helpful content update would take longer to roll out than originally expected. The update started to roll out on December 5th and was expected to finish earlier this week.

Google wrote on Twitter, “We are not” done yet rolling out the helpful content update. “While normally this update takes up to two weeks to complete, this one is going to take longer,” Google added.

Here is that tweet:

We are not. While normally this update takes up to two weeks to complete, this one is going to take longer. We will post to our page when it is done.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 20, 2022

John Mueller of Google added on mastodon, “Sometimes things are a bit slow to roll out, it usually doesn’t mean anything special.” “Perhaps Googlebot is tied up crawling all those holiday cookies,” he joked.

As a reminder, the Google helpful content update looks to weed out content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines that do not help or inform people. Google said this update will “tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines.” The update will “help make sure that unoriginal, low-quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search,” Google added. So if you are writing content to drive search engine visibility and traffic, you might be hit by this type of update, and non-English sites are no longer safe from this update.

So far, it has been hard to pinpoint any specific ranking changes specific to the helpful content update. Maybe we will see some sort of big shuffle or volatility towards the tail-end of the update. Keep in mind, Google is also rolling out December 2022 link spam updatewhere we think we are seeing on impact.

As soon as it is over, Google will inform us, and I will post more over here, Search Engine Land and on social.

Forum discussion at Twitter.