I’ll start by saying that was a hard title to write and I hope it makes sense. In short, Google’s John Mueller said on X, when it comes to fixing your site that was hit by the helpful content update, “it’s not relative to previously, it’s basically a re-evaluation of the whole site in the new / current online world & users expectations.”

What John is saying is that just because you improved the helpfulness of your content on your site by a specific amount, it still might not be good enough based on how you compare to those in your industry.

So you shouldn’t compare where you are today to where you are now, with your specific site. You need to compare yourself today to where you are with the current space you are in today.

Of course, you can always look at poor examples of sites outranking you that shouldn’t – so I am not sure how good this statement is when you look at specifics. But in general, it is a nice statement for any site owner.

Here is that post:

This is part of a much larger discussion on X:

So that is all the context – take from it what you want.

Forum discussion at X.