Google Explains The SEO Connection Of Site Quality On Unindexed Pages

Google’s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discuss the Page Indexing report and how it can be used to identify indexing problems. What is interesting is how they combine quality and index, saying that quality is not just about the text on a web page.

Index Occurs in Phases

Splitt and Mueller were discussing issues that could temporarily affect indexing such as server not responding, computers failing, DNS lookups sometimes failing, many reasons why Google may not be able to crawl a site, and following the advice that not everything needs to be investigated.
They then mentioned that when a site is new, the Page Index Report can show you the various stages of indexing a page goes through.

Splitt explained how this works:

“Also, if you’re adding or changing your site, or if your site is very new, you can also use this report to see a little bit of how your site is going through the different stages.

Because at some point, you will see pages that have been found that are not yet indexed, which tells you that we know they are there, but we haven’t actually visited them. And if we haven’t visited them, we can’t index them compared to crawlers that aren’t currently indexed, which means we visited them and didn’t index them. And that can be for all kinds of different reasons. “

Lack of References Is Not Always a Quality Problem

At this point, the discussion turned to quality issues in the context of the index and how that might impact. Mueller confirmed that this is not always about quality.

Splitt asked Mueller about a situation not identified in the Page Indexing Report:

“Would you say that is often or sometimes a sign of a quality problem?”

The answer comes from Mueller:

“Sometimes.”

Strong Concern for Quality

Mueller explained that an unspecified situation could be triggered if Google’s systems are “very concerned” about quality. That sounds strange for the program to be in such a state of concern. He probably meant that if the quality score or other indicator exceeds the threshold, this would mean that there is a “concern” about the quality associated with the site.

Mueller continued his response:

“Therefore, it is true if our systems are very concerned about the quality of the website that they will reduce the number of pages in the index. Because if we have a strong concern about the overall quality, it does not make much sense for our systems to spend more time on the website.

So we will probably crawl very slowly. We will point out very little. And then you’re going to see things like unreported crawls or unreported finds, that from our perspective, which is our plan to say, we know about this and when we’re happy, we’ll look again and see if we can identify it.”

Page Not Always Indexed For Technical Reason

It is not uncommon for a site owner to think that there is nothing wrong with their site, resulting in not being able to identify a page quality problem. No one knows the site and the site owner or SEO, and they put in the time to make it as perfect as possible. So it is understandable that one cannot see that there are real quality issues affecting the site.

So what happens is people try to find a technical problem to explain why the site can’t be listed. When that fails, some people believe they are victims of bad SEO and start a cycle of constantly breaking “bad” links, often without improvement.

If this sounds like your situation, you may want to seriously consider that there is a quality issue affecting the site, which may seem inconceivable because the site is “perfect.”

Mueller talks about this quality blind spot that can affect any site owner.

Mueller continued his response:

“It’s not so much that I would say that you should take these situations and try to fix them. From a technical point of view, it’s not that you need to fix this technical problem that Google is not indexing this page yet. But rather, you probably need to… if you see a big pattern like this, like Google is not indexing many of your pages, and there is no technical reason, you probably need to take a step back and think about a step.

And thinking about quality is really challenging because in most cases, it’s your website, and it’s your baby. And of course, he’s the best kid ever.”

Site Visitors And Overall Quality

At this point, Mueller added something unexpected to the discussion. He mentions how site visitors can look at a site and quickly decide that it lacks quality features such as uniqueness. He didn’t say that Google’s programs determined that the site lacked quality; he said it is possible that people do that.

He did not explicitly state that Google was picking up user signals that are indicative of site quality issues. But it sounds like you mean it.

Mueller continued his response:

“But taking a step back and trying to look at it through the eyes of someone who isn’t directly involved in your website, sometimes that opens up ideas for areas where you can improve, where maybe if most of your website is AI-generated and it’s been running for a while, people might look at this AI-generated site and they’re like, well, I can say that this is AI-generated, there’s nothing that stands out to me that’s different or important.

That’s not to say that all AI-generated content is bad, but sometimes you just run across websites where you like, anyone could have written this. This doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Martin Splitt commented on how difficult it is to realize that your best effort may not be as perfect as it seems.

Splitt says:

“Yes, that is true.

And I think what makes this difficult is not just the fact that obviously the way you wrote it is the way you thought it was the best, so you think it’s high quality, of course. So that’s really hard to get your point across.

But sometimes there are other great things too. So why would we add it to the index?

And then that can tell you, maybe this content isn’t as important as I thought, it’s because other people are covering the same thing. And what is the value of this version of being in the index?”

Overall Quality Is Not Just About the Text

Mueller responded to Splitt by saying that quality is not always about the text.

“I feel like we could have a whole podcast about quality. I think maybe another thing that should be talked about about quality is it’s not just the writing. So a lot of times people will say, well, my writing is different or my topics are good.

And they’re packaged on a page that’s bad for anyone to access, that when they try to load it, it’s like the furniture of their computer and they’re like, oh my god, I have to run to make sure my computer doesn’t explode. So maybe that’s an extreme case.”

If you only have one takeaway from this podcast, this should be it: Mueller says quality is more than just text. He said the way a user experiences a web page can also be a part of quality.

User Experience and Quality Issues

Mueller provided examples of the types of non-text quality issues that can negatively impact the user experience. He didn’t say that these problems would cause someone to leave the site, but the examples he shared were the kinds of things that would cause a site visitor to hit the backplane to leave the web page.

This is interesting because this is the kind of thing that can be detected, a signal of user behavior. You used the example of a recipe site that frustrates site visitors by making it difficult to find a recipe. That’s an example of a bad user experience as evidence of a quality problem.

Mueller actually calls the user experience by name, saying they probably have to consider the “full experience” to consider quality.

He continued:

“But you’ve all seen these pages where basically the text is there, but it’s almost hidden, hidden behind ads, hidden behind interstitials, hidden behind other things that go and come and go, maybe hidden under a lot of filler content, which we sometimes see, for example, with recipes where there’s this really long story at the top that most people probably don’t care about, and then comes the recipe.

These are all kinds of things where the overall quality is more than that piece of text that says, like, this is my main content, this is what Google should list on my site.

And in our opinion, we should probably consider the full information on the page because that’s what users see.

It’s not that users go to a web page and turn on a magic mode that just spits out text but they have a full experience of this website with all the 3D, 4D animations and everything.”

The taker

• Google may reduce visibility and indexing when its systems have strong concerns about the overall quality of a website.
• Site owners and SEOs should investigate quality issues when pages are indexed and there are no technical issues to blame.
• Quality is partly about whether the pages provide unique and useful information. In my opinion, different does not mean that the words are literally different from another site. Unique means the title, content, all aspects of the content and the way it is presented to the user.
• Slop content, both AI-generated and human-generated, can cause a quality problem that manifests itself in the form of site visitors leaving the page.
• Google looks at the full page information, including accessibility, functionality, ads, spaces, filler content, and how easily users can access the information they need.

Google’s John Mueller explained that widespread indexing problems can indicate concerns about a site’s overall quality. He pointed out that user experience is a factor that can influence indexing. The point to consider is that technical problems may not be the reason why the site is not indexed and that document is not the reason either, which is related to the user experience.

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