An Important Note on Site Quality From Google’s Search Expert

Anne Burns
Wed, 05 Jan 2022 16:03:49 +0000
Ux, Mobile ux, Seo, Seo strategy, Site optimization, Best cms, Search engine optimization, Site ux

Do you ever wonder if a few typos can impact your site’s search performance? According to Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller, it takes more than just a few grammatical missteps for Google’s crawler to determine your site’s quality.

During a New Year’s Eve Office Hours hangout, Mueller said that if certain portions of a website are deemed low quality, it can negatively impact the site’s search ranking overall. A good example of this is a site that has different language versions within the same domain. If the site has a French-language version that is made up of quality content, but the English translation isn’t up to the same standard, the ranking of the French version of the site could be negatively impacted.

“If you have a very low-quality translation that's also indexed and that's also very visible in search, then that can definitely pull down the good quality translation as well or the good quality original content that you also have,” Mueller said.

Watch where Mueller addresses this example:

English Google SEO office-hours from December 31, 2021 youtu.be

Click here to read more about site quality for multilingual domains from SEO Roundtable.

Even if your site isn’t translated into multiple languages, the example above serves as a useful illustration of how it only takes one page of low-quality content to negatively impact your site’s entire search ranking. This means that it’s more important to make sure your overall site is delivering quality content up to Google’s standards, rather than stressing about where exactly all those typos and grammatical errors are living on your site.

According to Mueller, site quality is “usually not something where they’re individual things that we could just point at and say, ‘Oh, if you have five misspellings on a page, that’s a sign of low quality.’ These things happen individually. All of these factors individually are hard to say that they are a sign of something being low quality, but rather we have to take everything together and figure out what the mix is together.”

Here’s more from Mueller:

English Google SEO office-hours from December 31, 2021 youtu.be

Since Google measures quality at the site level, it can take a while for Google to index a new content update. So if you’re working to improve the content on your site, don’t get discouraged if it takes longer for Google to register the improvements.

More from @johnmu: For evaluating site quality, Google looks at many factors together (no short list of items). This is why it can take a long time when improving site quality to see improvement (it can take months or longer for G's systems to understand) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrgtKt4u8nk&t=654s\u00a0\u2026pic.twitter.com/UdsmLtdXqp
— Glenn Gabe (@Glenn Gabe) 1641134005

Thread featured on SEO Roundtable.

In short, it’s important to make sure your site’s content is human-centric, which Google calls its E-A-T method. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and truthfulness. To put it simply, make sure that the content on your site is easy, enjoyable, and helpful to read. Click here to read more about Google’s standards around quality content.

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