What is Information Gain and does it explain the Helpful Content Update?

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to episode 95 of SEO is not that hard.

Today, I'm going to be talking about information gain and how that may be the factor that is now explaining what's happening with a helpful content update. But first of all, I'll just talk about what information gain is in itself. Now, information gain it's a concept that's included in a recent Google patent called contextual estimation of link information gain. I'll put a link to that actual patent in the show notes that Google was awarded in 2022, so just a couple years ago Now. In this patent, it describes how Google might rank pages based on how likely they are to bring new information. This is the information gain to a browser compared with pages. This browser, this searcher, has actually surfaced, so it achieves this by calculating an information gain score for every page that it might show to the user after every query page view or search engine result page that the searcher has seen, and then after every new interaction, after every new page they look at, after every new search engine results page they look at, they recalculate the score after those interactions. And so by doing this, what they are trying to ensure is that a searcher will continue to surface new information with every search and every step, rather than being stuck sort of only seeing the same pages again and again and again in search results that contain the same or very similar content. So this is quite simple in effect, and to explain, but you can see how it could have massive sort of implications for the information Google actually sees.

Now the example in the actual patent that they give as a sort of an explanation of how this might work, is someone who is searching for a solution to a problem they have with their computer and how, in the first instance, they might show documents that show general information on how to narrow down whether a problem might be a hardware problem or a software problem, and then that's what the searcher sees to start with. And then the searcher comes back and it narrows down their search and it's now not going to look to give them something so general as that. It's going to try and narrow down and give something where it might show them something about different software issues and how they then narrow down from that. And then, once they narrow down from software and narrow down and iterate their searches to find a solution to their problem and how, every step of the way, they give an information gain score, calculate an information gain score for every page or every document and then recalibrate the results based upon that score. So the interesting thing now is this was obviously awarded in 2022 and then since 2022, we've seen a lot of changes in the search with the helpful content update, reviews, updates, things like that that you could easily see as being affected by this kind of concept. Now, word of warning obviously, just because something's in a patent that google's been awarded doesn't necessarily mean it's made it into the search rankings. But this one's quite elegant and I can see how, with the results we've seen for people being hit by Helpful Content Update and others, how it might work. So let's delve into that a little bit more. So if we step back prior to 2022, maybe go two, three years before that.

This where in the, especially in the niche site world, there was a sort of prevalence of these um sort of concepts. These strategies that people were take were sort of using to create content, and that was essentially looking at everything in the top 10 for a keyword or a topic and then saying, saying right, I'm going to create a page that is at least as long as all the others. It's going to cover everything that all the others do, so that I cover everything about the topic on one page. Some people call it the skyscraper or the shotgun skyscraper technique, and what you're essentially doing is just okay, not necessarily copying the words, um, we're basically copying the concepts, copying the answers in all those pages, copying things like headings, uh, making sure that that you basically were the sum of everything that was the top ranking, to then try and take that number one spot and various tools come out to help do that, things like surfer, seo, which again will do the same thing it crawls the um, the serps, finds what is on all those pages, and then make sure that you essentially replicate the same kind of answers and the same kind of information, the same kind of length, same kind of headings on those pages. You rewrite it obviously make your own content, but you're really just aggregating the information in terms of information gain. Is there an information gain over all the other pages combined? Not really, you're just becoming the average.

Uh, trying to average out those, and ai has done the same things. That ai obviously goes, reads a huge corpus of information and then when you ask it a question, it's we know how it works. It is calculating what the next most likely word is, to come after every other word and build up an answer based on that kind of probability score. It neither is it actually generating any new information gain. It's not bringing anything new. It's only averaging out the existing content.

Now, these are the kind of um sites, the signs of content that google is wanting to hit and has been hitting. And then, if you look at that and these are the pages and the type of pages, they're being hit and it just happens to coincide at the same time as this, this google patent was awarded. Since then we've had all these changes, these updates, which are trying to bring helpful content, as google call it. Now, obviously, what's helpful content is something that is new you learn from you've learned something you didn't know before. That's information gain. So rather than just going through results and seeing the same kind of answers, the same kind of information, maybe worded slightly differently, maybe displayed slightly differently, but ultimately all saying the same thing, there's no information gain. There is there. No one's gained anything. And this could be possibly the first element of trying to figure out why sites got hit by helpful content. What is the difference between them and other sites that didn't get hit?

And I think, if you look at how people actually do search and they come out, you search yourself. If you've got a subject or a topic you're interested in, whether it's something you're interested in for a long time or whether it's something travel being a good example you're looking to go somewhere and you're thinking about going holiday somewhere. You'll probably start googling and thinking about that for a long time before you get to the booking point. You're going to do a bit of research, you'll be interested in the place and google's going to know and see that you are doing that over time and see from your browsing, searching and reading behavior and what you're learning along the way. So it means when you get closer and closer and you are trying to get to the point of going somewhere and making decisions on things.

If it's trying to bring you new information all the time, then pages which have just got lots of information you've already seen are going to obviously be less likely to be displayed if they're using information gain as a key ranking factor and you can see how it makes sense. So if you're trying to start off and build sites by build pages, by just being the covering everything everybody else is already doing, you're not actually bringing anything new. You're not bringing any information gain to to. People might kind of tie in why we're seeing reddit getting so much traffic as well at the same time, because people on reddit are just talking about their experiences and they're probably going to talk about all sorts of different experiences. There's probably going to be things in there that are not anywhere else. So I know there's issues with the quality of some of the stuff on reddit and the fact that some of it's quite old that's being serviced.

I'm not saying google is perfect in what they're trying to do here, but it fits. It makes sense why all those new pieces of information that are really new information gain are being surfaced and why so much traffic is all of a sudden being shoved to Reddit. Now it might be that the scoring system here is wrong if you wanted to get good results. I'm not trying to justify the results as being good. I'm just trying to look at this and say how do we explain those results, given the types of sites we've seen hit, types of sites we've seen doing well, and patents like this one, um, concepts like this one that could work in it and, yeah, this one. Actually the pieces of the jigsaw are starting to fit.

It's early days, though this could all be wrong, but in general it's an interesting concept. If I were to say to somebody, if I was writing a site, creating, creating new content now, I would be thinking well, I actually want to write something that is new, genuinely new, would genuinely bring information gain to somebody. And it's not about writing it better than somebody else. It's not about having quality content. You might be able to write something and produce something of better quality than another site, but if someone's already seen the basic information on the other site first, google's not going to show your site in terms of information gain, because you might display it more, you know more in a more beautiful way, but you're not actually bringing any gain to someone with that information. You know they've already learned that, so just seeing it in a more beautiful fashion doesn't help them. They want to see something new, or google wants to give them something new, so this could explain a lot. So, um, you know there's a lot more research to do around this and I see a lot of people talking about information gain all of a sudden.

I think it's it's a very interesting topic. I think it could have impacts on a lot of strategies that people have been following previously. If this proves to be, um, the difference that it would mean that the kind of tactic that people are using for Surfer SEO and just trying to be the average of everything on the first page is not going to fly anymore and new strategies are going to have to come from it. But I think if you look at it from a point of view of I want to have content that brings information gain to people, then it's probably going to be a good starting point. And even if this is the wrong strategy because technically this is wrong the idea of actually trying to bring something new that's not out there that's got to be a good strategy, because you know you're going to have. You are then going to have unique content that is truly unique, has a unique data point and unique point of view and isn't just very similar to what everybody else is writing up.

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Usedcom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.