I Sharted and Finally Understood the Helpful Content Update

I want to tell you about the worst day of my life, and how it relates to your website's traffic. Bear with me. This is going somewhere. Probably.

The Consumption

It started, as most disasters do, with a series of small decisions that seemed fine at the time.

I ate a whole bag of peanuts. Not a small bag. The Costco bag. The one that's meant for a family of four over the course of a month. I ate it in one sitting because it was there, on my desk, and I was reading something online, and my hand just kept going back to the bag. You know how it is. You're not even hungry. You're just... consuming. The bag was open. The peanuts were salted. One leads to another leads to another leads to you're holding an empty bag and your fingers are coated in salt residue and you're wondering what happened to your afternoon.

Then I ate half a jar of peanut butter. Different peanut product, same energy. I had a spoon. I had the jar. I had time. What was I supposed to do, exercise restraint? Close the jar like some kind of adult? No. I kept going. Spoonful after spoonful, watching the peanut butter level descend like a slow tide going out, until I'd crossed the halfway mark and the shame set in and I finally stopped.

Then, because apparently I had decided that today was the day I would test the structural limits of my gastrointestinal system, I ate a can of sardines.

Why sardines? I don't know. They were in the pantry. They're healthy, I think. Omega-3s. Good for the brain. I needed the protein to balance out the peanuts. That was my reasoning, anyway. The reasoning of a man who had already consumed roughly 4,000 calories of legume-based products and was now adding small oily fish to the mixture like a scientist who has lost control of his experiment but can't stop adding reagents.

I sat back down at my computer. I was reading Hacker News. Everything seemed fine.

The Catalyst

And then I sneezed.

Just once. A single sneeze. The kind of sneeze that comes out of nowhere, that ambushes you, that gives you no time to prepare. One second I'm reading a comment thread about Rust versus Go, and the next second my body is convulsing with a violent involuntary exhalation that starts in my sinuses and ends...

Elsewhere.

I felt it immediately. The warmth. The wetness. The wrongness. That unmistakable sensation that tells you something has happened in your pants that should not have happened. That tells you the structural integrity of your afternoon has been compromised.

I had sharted.

For those unfamiliar with the term, and God bless you if you are, a shart is when you attempt to fart and something more substantial comes out. It is a portmanteau of two words that I will not spell out because this is a professional website about search engine optimization and I have some standards. A shart is a betrayal by your own body. A miscommunication between your brain and your bowels. A failure of the internal systems that are supposed to distinguish between gas and catastrophe.

The sneeze had triggered it. Some kind of pressure cascade. The peanuts and the peanut butter and the sardines, all that matter compressed into my digestive tract, and then the sneeze adding just enough additional force to push everything past the point of no return.

I sat there for a moment. Very still. Assessing the situation. Hoping, somehow, that I was wrong. That the sensation I was feeling was something else, anything else. A figment. A false alarm.

It was not a false alarm.

The Cascade

I stood up carefully, like a man defusing a bomb, and began the wobble to the bathroom. Every step was a negotiation. Every movement a risk assessment. I had to get there without making things worse, without spreading the damage, without turning a localized incident into a regional disaster.

I made it. I discovered the horror. I will spare you the details except to say that it was worse than I had hoped and better than I had feared. I cleaned myself up as best I could with the materials available. But my underwear was ruined. There was no saving them. They were casualties of the peanut-sardine conflict, and they had to be disposed of.

This meant I needed new underwear. The new underwear was upstairs. I was downstairs. The stairs were between us.

So I began the ascent. Pants around my ankles, because putting them back on seemed wrong and also they needed to be washed. I was shuffling up the stairs like a penguin, like a man in shackles, like someone who had made a series of poor decisions and was now living the consequences of those decisions one humiliating step at a time.

And then I stumbled.

My foot caught on my bunched-up pants. I pitched forward. I reached for the banister and missed. I went down.

I will not describe the next forty-five seconds except to say that they involved tumbling, flailing, cursing, the reopening of issues I had thought resolved, the involvement of the carpet, and a final resting position at the bottom of the stairs that would have been difficult to explain to anyone who happened to walk in at that moment.

I lay there, on the floor, in conditions I will not describe, and I thought to myself:

This is what happens when you overconsume and then something sneezes.

The Revelation

I'm going to tell you something now that I've never told anyone. As I lay there on that carpet, in that condition, something clicked in my brain. Something about SEO. Something I'd been trying to understand for months.

I finally understood the Helpful Content Update.

See, here's what happened to me that day. I consumed too much. Way too much. More than my system could process. Peanuts and peanut butter and sardines, all crammed in there, more than I needed, more than was healthy, more than my body could reasonably be expected to handle. And for a while, nothing happened. The system held. I sat at my computer, functioning normally, reading my Hacker News comments. From the outside, everything looked fine.

And then one small trigger. One sneeze. One tiny additional pressure. And the whole system failed catastrophically.

And then, when I tried to fix it, I made it worse. Every step I took to recover from the initial disaster led to a new disaster. The wobble to the bathroom. The trip upstairs. The fall on the stairs. Each attempted fix cascading into a fresh catastrophe. The recovery was worse than the initial incident.

That's what I've watched happen to websites since August 2022.

The Overconsumption

For years, websites did what I did with those peanuts. They consumed and consumed and consumed. Not peanuts, but content. AI content. Programmatic content. Template content. "How to [verb] a [noun]" times ten thousand. "Best [product] for [use case]" times infinity. Content not because users needed it but because the algorithm rewarded volume. Content as peanuts. Handful after handful. The bag is open. The rankings are rising. What are you supposed to do, stop?

They added more. They added links. They added schema. They added internal linking strategies so aggressive that every page linked to every other page in a great tangled web of self-reference. They added FAQ sections that answered questions nobody asked. They added author bios for authors who didn't exist. They added "Last Updated" timestamps that updated automatically whether anything had changed or not.

They stuffed themselves. Like me with the peanut butter. Spoonful after spoonful. They couldn't stop. The metrics kept going up. The content kept ranking. They crossed the halfway mark and kept going.

And then they added the sardines. The guest posts. The link schemes. The PBNs. The "digital PR" that was really just paid placements with extra steps. The toxic stuff that should have stayed in the pantry. But it's healthy, they told themselves. It's good for the domain authority. It's omega-3s for the backlink profile.

And for a while, it worked. They sat at their computers, watching the traffic, watching the revenue. Everything seemed fine.

The Sneeze

And then Google sneezed.

August 2022. The Helpful Content Update. Just one algorithm adjustment. A single sneeze. A small additional pressure on a system that was already holding too much.

And websites across the internet sharted.

Traffic down 40%. 60%. 90%. The warmth. The wetness. The wrongness. That unmistakable sensation that something has happened to your analytics that should not have happened. That tells you the structural integrity of your business model has been compromised.

They didn't understand it. They hadn't done anything wrong, they thought. They were just doing what everyone else was doing. Consuming content. Adding pages. Building links. The bag was open. The jar was there. What were they supposed to do?

But that was the problem. They'd consumed too much, and it was all still in there, all that undigested content and those dubious links and those programmatic pages that existed to game the algorithm rather than help users. And when the sneeze came, all of it came out at once.

The Cascade

And then they tried to fix it. Like me wobbling to the bathroom. Like me shuffling up the stairs with my pants around my ankles. Every step careful. Every movement a risk.

They deleted content. Not strategically, but in a panic. Mass deletions. Thousands of pages, gone. They didn't know which pages were the problem, so they deleted all of them. They didn't realize that deleting content creates its own problems. Broken internal links. 404 errors. Orphaned pages. The carpet was getting involved.

They disavowed links. All of them. The bad ones and the good ones. They didn't know which links were toxic, so they nuked the entire backlink profile. Years of legitimate link building, gone. They'd just kneecapped their own authority because they were panicking.

They rewrote their content. Added more E-E-A-T signals. Author bios for authors who still didn't exist, but now with LinkedIn profiles that were created last week. "Expert" quotes from "industry professionals" they'd invented. They were trying to fix the problem by adding more of the thing that had caused the problem. They were eating more peanuts to settle their stomach.

They stumbled on the stairs.

The September update hit. The October update hit. The November update hit. Each one catching them mid-recovery, each one sending them tumbling again, each one finding some new problem they'd created while trying to fix the last problem. They were at the bottom of the stairs now, in a condition they couldn't explain to anyone who walked in.

The Lie at the Bottom of the Stairs

Here's what I realized, lying on that carpet in my condition. Here's the thing that clicked.

The sneeze wasn't the problem. The fall on the stairs wasn't the problem. The problem was everything that came before. The problem was the consumption. The peanuts and the peanut butter and the sardines. The content and the links and the programmatic pages. All that stuff I'd crammed into my system because it was there, because it was easy, because everyone else was doing it, because it felt good in the moment.

The sneeze just revealed what was already true. The fall just accelerated what was already happening. The carpet just... look, I don't want to extend this metaphor any further than I already have.

The Helpful Content Update didn't break these websites. These websites were already broken. They were held together by algorithmic tolerance and competitor mediocrity. They were ranking not because they deserved to rank but because everyone else was doing the same thing and Google hadn't gotten around to fixing it yet.

The sneeze was coming. It was always coming. The only question was when.

The Recovery

I eventually got up off that carpet. I cleaned myself up again. I found new underwear. I washed everything that needed washing, including the carpet. It took a while. It was unpleasant. But I recovered.

I also changed my diet. Not because I'm some kind of health guru now, but because I learned something that day about what happens when you overconsume. When you cram things into your system just because they're there. When you optimize for short-term satisfaction at the expense of long-term structural integrity.

The websites that recovered from the Helpful Content Update did something similar. They didn't just delete and disavow and panic-rewrite. They fundamentally changed their approach. They stopped consuming content for consumption's sake. They stopped building links for link metrics' sake. They stopped stuffing themselves with peanuts just because the bag was open.

They started asking a question that seems obvious but apparently wasn't: does this actually help anyone?

Not "will this rank?" Not "will this build authority?" Not "will this fill out our content calendar?" Just: does this help anyone? Would a human being, with a real question, find value in this?

If the answer was no, they didn't publish it. Revolutionary.

The Lesson

I'm not proud of what happened to me that day. I don't tell this story at parties. I've never told it to anyone, actually, until now, to you, the stranger reading an SEO blog on the internet. I hope you appreciate the vulnerability involved here. I hope you understand what it costs me to share this.

But I'm telling you because I need you to understand something about the Helpful Content Update and all the updates that have come after it. Something that I didn't understand until I was lying on a carpet at the bottom of the stairs in a condition I still have nightmares about.

The problem is never the sneeze. The problem is what you've been putting into your system. The problem is the overconsumption. The problem is the peanuts and the peanut butter and the sardines, consumed not because you needed them but because they were there, because it was easy, because what were you supposed to do, stop?

Yes. You were supposed to stop.

You were supposed to look at the bag and think about whether you actually needed more peanuts. You were supposed to put down the spoon before you hit the halfway mark on the peanut butter. You were supposed to leave the sardines in the pantry, where they belong, because nobody needs that much protein and omega-3s are not worth what comes next.

You were supposed to build a website that helps people instead of a website that games algorithms. You were supposed to create content because you had something to say, not because you had a content calendar to fill. You were supposed to earn links because you made something worth linking to, not because you had a "link velocity target."

And if you didn't do those things, if you consumed and consumed and consumed until your system was packed full of stuff that had no business being in there, then the sneeze was coming. It was always coming. The only question was when.

For me, the sneeze came on a Tuesday, while reading Hacker News, after a regrettable series of dietary choices.

For your website, the sneeze came in August 2022. Or September 2023. Or March 2024. Or it's coming. It's still coming. Google keeps sneezing. And every time it sneezes, more websites discover what they've been holding inside them all along.

The Moral

I no longer eat whole bags of peanuts. I no longer follow half a bag of peanuts with half a jar of peanut butter. I definitely no longer add sardines to that combination. I've learned to consume in moderation. To stop before I'm overfull. To leave things in the pantry.

This has made me a healthier person. It has also dramatically reduced the number of carpet-related incidents in my life, which I think we can all agree is a good thing.

I would recommend a similar approach to your SEO strategy.

Stop stuffing your site with content you don't need. Stop building links you can't justify. Stop adding pages just because your competitors have pages. Stop consuming just because the bag is open.

Because the sneeze is coming. It's always coming. And when it comes, you're going to find out what you're really made of.

I found out what I was really made of that day on the stairs. Peanuts and peanut butter and sardines, mostly. It was not a pleasant discovery.

I hope your website holds up better than my underwear did.