Google has updated its helpful content guidelines. Search Engine Journal's coverage of the change breaks down the four signals Google now says it checks for directly. For a trade business writing about its own work, the update is good news. It rewards exactly the kind of content a genuine business is positioned to write.
The four things Google now says it checks for
- Effort: whether real work went into the page, rather than it being generated and published with minimal review
- Originality: whether the content says something not already said, word for word, on dozens of other sites
- Skill and experience: whether the person behind the content actually knows the subject first hand
- Accuracy: whether the claims made on the page are true and can be checked
Why a trade business should care about rater guidelines
These four signals come from Google's search quality rater guidelines, the document human reviewers use to judge whether a page is genuinely helpful. They are not a ranking algorithm in the technical sense. Google has confirmed that the broader aims those raters check for do influence how content gets evaluated over time.
A generic page describing "common signs you need a new boiler" tends to score poorly against all four signals. That is especially true if it makes no reference to any job you have actually done. A page describing three boilers you personally replaced recently scores well against all four without trying. It can simply describe what you found, and what you told each customer.
This is the same shift described in our guide on the recent Google and ChatGPT warnings, from a different source and a different angle. Both point the same direction: genuine, specific, first hand content is becoming the baseline expectation, not a nice-to-have.