Owning and managing a website is a big investment – much like having a beautiful garden. There is a lot of work at the start and constant maintenance is needed to ensure that the best possible results are achieved. Some people have parts of the garden that are better than others. Maybe the back garden is neat, yet the front is neglected? However good the back garden is, the state of the front will always pull it down overall. The same is true of websites according to latest Google commentary. This article will take a detailed look at exactly what is meant by this.
Google have stated that when it assesses a website for quality all of the site is taken into account. If 9 out of 10 parts of the site are fine, or even good, that 1 out of 10 parts that isn’t will impact the domain as a whole, and yes, this could have an effect on rankings and ultimately traffic / conversions.
An interesting example was given of a French translation website, which happened to offer German translation services, though this was not the main part of the business and only a small ‘side part.’ As the company was not very experienced in the German side, the language and style used on its pages was poor. Despite the company being experts at French and all French pages being sound, this was enough to pull the website down in quality – so much so that it began impacting the French area of business that the company were sound at providing.
To continue the garden analogy, maybe you are a garden centre that have near perfect pages on flowers and plants and this is where you get most of your business. Imagine you offer shrubs and bushes also, but these pages are not so detailed, accurate or refined – maybe you just didn’t have the time or don’t feel as passionately about them? You could find that the whole of your website could be in trouble, so it is really something that webmasters need to pay attention to.
Google have indicated that when assessing site quality, they look for issues or things which stand out as ‘red flags’ to them, but as usual, they have avoided a deeper explanation as to what these things are, leaving many guessing and resorting to using common sense.
It would seem that Google favour an ‘all or nothing’ approach when it comes to website quality. Either have a great website or anything short of this will not do. Of course, this is a very black and white way of looking at it. There are sliding scales of poorer pages and parts of the website, and one would expect (hope) that websites will not be penalised if most of the site is up at 90% and one is at 75% for example – these are still good figures all round after all.
Many people are reporting that their content or pages are failing to get indexed by Google. Seemingly there is nothing wrong with these pages and it can lead to people becoming bewildered. Now there is at least some explanation or relationship that can be drawn. It may not be about your individual pages but your site as a whole. If you find yourself in this situation, then we suggest you look through all of your website to determine any problems which could be dragging it downwards collectively.
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