Everyone would love to know what the formula is for getting a website to rank as well as possible in search. How do search engines, and above all Google as the most popular, evaluate the value and quality of content on the site? John Mueller from Google tried to answer this question.

Mueller says it can take months for Google to figure out how a site fits into the overall Internet in terms of site quality. The time required for Google to understand possible changes or corrections to the site can take several months.

How long does it take for Google to assess the quality of a site?

John Mueller answered a question about this topic and gave an interesting answer about why it is important for Google to understand how a website fits into the overall context of the Internet. Not too much detail on this topic though.

However, the emphasis placed on the fact that Google must understand the fit of the site in the entire Internet and that it can take months until this assessment is completed, implies that this is an important issue for Google . And in that case, it is an important question for SEO as well.

The site quality assessment question that was asked is:

“Are there situations in which Google denies the authority of a site that cannot be recovered, even if the cause (loss of position and authority) is removed.”

So, assuming the cause was short-term turbulence with technical issues or content changes, how long will it take for Google to re-evaluate the site and fully restore its authority, search position and traffic?

Does Google have such a memory ?”

How Google determines site quality

Mueller first talks about the easier situation where the site goes down for a short period of time.

“In terms of the technical stuff, I would say that for the most part we don’t remember that kind of thing in the sense that if we can’t index the website for a while or if something goes down for a while and comes back then we have that content again, we have that information again, and we can show it again.

It’s something that usually goes right back to the way it was.

And that’s something that I think we have to have because the internet is very fickle sometimes 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 address that, because users are still looking for those websites.”

Overall quality and relevance of the site

A more difficult problem for Google is understanding the overall quality of a site, especially how the site fits in with the rest of the Internet.

Mueller continues:

” I think it’s much more difficult when it comes to general quality issues, where assessing the overall quality and relevance of web pages is not easy.

It takes us a long time to understand how a website fits in with the rest of the internet. And that means, on the one hand, that it takes us a long time to recognize that maybe something is not as good as we thought it was.

Similarly, it takes us a long time to notice the opposite again.

And that is something that can easily take, I don’t know, a few months, half a year, sometimes longer than half a year, to recognize significant changes in the overall quality of the site.

Because basically we’re looking at… how a particular site fits into the context of the whole web and that’s just time-consuming.

So that’s something that I would say compared to the technical issues, it takes a lot longer to refresh things on that.”

The context of the site within the entire Internet

The way the site fits into the context of the entire net seems to be looking at the forest for the trees. We seem to focus on trees (titles, keywords, headings, site architecture, links).

But what about how the site fits in with the rest of the internet? Is that taken into account?

Since the question of how a site fits into the overall Internet is very general and can encompass many things, it is probably not at the center of attention when thinking about optimization.

In this case, Mueller is most likely referring to the content itself and how that content differs from other sites on a similar topic, how it includes more information, or how the content is better or worse compared to other sites.

The question is, what are the other sites against which the quality is compared? Does the site compare to the top ranked sites? Or with all sites dealing with a particular topic?

Mueller keeps mentioning that Google is trying to understand how the site fits into the overall Internet, and it would certainly be desirable to know a little more about this issue.

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Source: Searchenginejournal