Google's 'helpful content' update began rolling out on August 25th and looks to be a major new ranking signal with potentially long term repercussions.

According to Google, this is "part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results."

In short, it's intended to weed out sites that focus on creating content for search engines.

Here are the details as Google presents them. I've emphasized the most important parts in bold and formatted Google's qualifying questions in a table so you can use them as a checklist.

Google wants you to
Focus on people-first content

The helpful content update aims to better reward content where visitors feel they've had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn't meet a visitor's expectations won't perform as well.

The best way to ensure you're creating content that will be successful with the new update is by following Google's long-standing advice and guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines.

People-first content creators focus first on...