According to a recent podcast, Google’s indexing and crawling decisions are primarily influenced by the quality of the content.
Highlights
- Quality affects everything in search, especially indexing.
- However, quality content doesn’t guarantee high rankings.
- Removing low quality content can help improve Google’s perception of a site.
According to a recent conversation between John Mueller and Gary Illyes of Google’s Search Relations team, quality is a crucial component affecting almost every aspect of search.
The two discussed quality’s importance in everything from crawling and indexing to ranking during the most recent episode of “Search Off the Record” podcast.
High ranks are not guaranteed by quality content, but it can influence how Google views a site.
Additionally, the conversation dispelled common SEO myths and clarified that affiliate sites can produce quality content.
Here are the highlights from the latest podcast episode.
Quality Affects Every Aspect of Search
Illyes claims that quality has a big impact on all search algorithms, affecting everything from sitemaps to ranking.
Illyes emphasized the scope of quality’s involvement from sitemaps to ranking, saying that it “affects pretty much everything that the Search systems do.”
The discussion made it clear that Google’s crawl scheduler prioritizes URLs for crawling based on quality signals. Google tries to create an ordered list based on its expected quality if it has X URLs from a site to crawl.
Illyes adds that quality is an important consideration in indexing decisions:
The most crucial factor is quality. Always high quality. The quality is the main factor in determining the majority of our indexing and crawling decisions, even if I think that’s something that people outside the company don’t necessarily want to accept.
Even for new sites, the crawling process can be impacted by a website’s quality. For instance, if a new page is found through sitemaps, Google may opt not to crawl the new page based on the quality of the previously crawled homepage.
Clearing Up SEO Misconceptions
During the debate, Illyes dispelled a few widespread myths about SEO.
Contrary to popular assumption, affiliate links and duplicate content are often not a problem as long as the surrounding content is valuable and distinct.
The same is true for text that has been translated, albeit machine translations should definitely be reviewed by a human.
Affiliate Sites & Quality
Illyes emphasized that there are other factors involved with affiliate sites besides the affiliate link. The caliber of the content surrounding the product is equally important.
He claims:
“High-quality content counts if a product is reviewed, images are taken, and original content is created.”
Summary
Enhancing a site’s overall quality can have a favorable impact on how Google crawls, indexes, and interprets a site. The remainder of the website can gain from the removal of low-quality information.
Although producing high-quality content on its own cannot ensure good rankings, doing so will probably improve a site’s position in search results.
