Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about a website’s poor translation. He expanded on his response to address how Google rates a website’s quality when one section of it is of poor quality.
While the question is about a section of a website that has a poor translation, Mueller’s response provides insight into how site quality, even in a single section of a website, can affect the entire website and rankings.
Low Quality Section of a Website
The person who posed the question wanted to know if a poor translation could have an impact on an entire website.
He asked:
“I wonder if a poor translation of a new language version can negatively affect the SEO for (the) domain’s more established main language versions.”
He then gave the example of a well-known French-language site whose publisher adds a German language section to the site with subpar autogenerated German-language content.
He admitted that he is aware that Google frowns on poor translation quality.
What he wanted to know was whether this poor quality section could bring the rest of the site down, or if the poor quality would be limited to that section of the site.
Read Top 14 Reasons Google Isn’t Indexing Your Website.
One Part of Site Can Drag Down Entire Site
John Mueller responded to the question of whether the poor quality would be limited to a single section of a site.
Mueller:
“I guess the short answer is yes.
The main issue is less about these being translated versions of the content, but more that for some things, we look at the quality of the site overall.
Ans when we look at the quality of the site overall, if you have significant portions that are lower quality it doesn’t matter for us like why they would be lower quality.
If they’re just bad translations, of if they’re terrible content or whatever.
But if we see that there are significant parts that are lower quality then we might think overall this website is not so fantastic as we thought.
And that can have effects in different places across the website.
So in short, I guess 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.”
No Big Red Flags for Site Quality
We sometimes look for big red flags that stand out, but John Mueller explains that in terms of site quality, it’s a matter of many things working together, like signals, to indicate whether the site is high or low quality.
Mueller began talking about overall site quality assessment after the person asked a follow-up question about translations.
He described how many different low-quality aspects of a site can combine to contribute to a negative quality rating from Google for the entire site.
Mueller explained:
“So at least the way that I understand it, it’s more a matter of us trying to understand the quality of the website overall.
And that’s usually not something where they’re individual things that we could just point at and say like, oh, if you have five misspellings on a page, that’s a sign of low quality.
These things happen individually.
And all of these factors I think individually are hard to say that they’re a sign of something being low quality but rather we have to take everything together and then figure out what the mix is together.
And that’s also a reason why sometimes when you significantly improve the quality of a website overall or when things get significantly worse, it just takes a lot of time for our systems to figure out like oh, overall the view of this website is now better or worse.
So from that point of view, it’s not that we have anything specific that we could point at.”
Overall Site Quality
Mueller has been talking a lot about overall site quality over the last year, and it’s been fascinating to learn about it, especially since so many people are reporting that their content isn’t being indexed.
An important takeaway, in my opinion, is that there isn’t a single big specific red flag to point to as being to blame for poor site quality. Rather, it is a combination of factors that work together to convey a sense of overall quality.
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