Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about how long it takes Google to recognize the quality of a website. During the course of answering the question, he mentioned something that bears further investigation, and that is the concept of how Google values understanding how a website fits into the context of the overall Internet.
What Role Does A Website Play On The Internet?
John Mueller’s statement about how Google seeks to understand a website’s fit into the overall Internet as part of evaluating a site for quality is brief, but the emphasis he places on it and his statement that the assessment can take months imply that it is significant.
- Is he referring to linking patterns?
- Is he referring to the content’s text?
If it’s important to Google, it must be important to SEO.
How Long Does It Take To Reevaluate A Website?
The questioner used the example of a site that goes down for a period of time and how long it might take Google to restore traffic and so-called “authority,” which Google does not use.
This is the question about Google site quality:
“Are there any situations where Google negates a site’s authority that can’t be recovered, even if the cause has been rectified.
So, assuming that the cause was a short term turbulence with technical issues or content changes, how long for Google to reassess the website and fully restore authority, search position and traffic?
Does Google have a memory as such?”
Read How to Run an Outreach Link Building Campaign?
How Google Evaluates Site Quality
Mueller starts with the simple case of a site going down for a short period of time.
John Mueller’s answer:
“For technical things, I would say we pretty much have no memory in the sense that if we can’t crawl a website for awhile or if something goes missing for awhile and it comes back then we have that content again, we have that information again, we can show that again.
That’s something that pretty much picks up instantly again.
And this is something that I think we have to have because the Internet is sometimes very flaky and sometimes sites go offline for a week or even longer.
And they come back and it’s like nothing has changed but they fixed the servers.
And we have to deal with that and users are still looking for those websites.”
A Website’s Overall Quality and Relevance
Mueller then discusses Google’s more difficult problem of understanding the overall quality of a site, particularly how a site fits into the rest of the Internet.
Mueller continues:
“I think it’s a lot trickier when it comes to things around quality in general where assessing the overall quality and relevance of a website is not very easy.
It takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the Internet.
And that means on the one hand it takes a lot of time for us to recognize that maybe something is not as good as we thought it was.
Similarly, it takes a lot of time for us to learn the opposite again.
And that’s something that can easily take, I don’t know, a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year, for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality.
Because we essentially watch out for …how does this website fit in with the context of the overall web and that just takes a lot of time.
So that’s something where I would say, compared to technical issues, it takes a lot longer for things to be refreshed in that regard.”
The Position of a Site in Relation to the Rest of the Internet
The way a site fits into the context of the overall web appears to be the forest rather than the trees.
We seem to focus on the trees, headings, keywords, titles, site architecture, and inbound links as SEOs and publishers.
But how does the site fit in with the rest of the Internet? Is that taken into account? Is that something that anyone’s internal site audit checklist includes?
Perhaps because the phrase “how a site fits into the overall Internet” is so broad and can mean so many different things, I suspect it isn’t always the first consideration in a site audit or site planning.
Site A Quality Assessment Hypothetical Example
Consider Site A as an example. In the context of links, the phrase can refer to the sites that link into Example Site A as well as what Example Site A links out to, as well as the interconnected network that results and how it reflects in terms of topic and site quality.
That interconnected network could include topic-related sites or pages. It could also be linked to spam via the sites to which Example Site A links.
John Mueller may also be referring to the content itself, and how it differs from other sites on a similar topic, whether it contains more information, or whether it is better or worse in comparison to other sites.
What are those other websites? Are they comparable to top-ranked sites? Or simply in comparison to all non-spam sites?
Mueller keeps mentioning how Google tries to understand how a site fits into the larger web, and it might be helpful to know a little more about this.
Need help with our free SEO tools? Try our free Robots.txt Generator, Get Source Code of Webpage, Domain into IP.
One Comment