Google: One Part Of Site Can Hurt Entire Site Quality

credit: Roger Montti

John Mueller discusses how Google assesses websites for site quality, which is important given how so many sites have trouble with indexing

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about a poor translation on a website. He expanded his answer to address the issue of how Google rates a website for quality when one section of it is of poor quality.

While the question is about a section of a site that has a poor translation, Mueller’s answer provides insights into how site quality, even in one section of a site, can affect the entire website and the rankings.

Low Quality Section of a Website

The person asking the question wanted to know if a poor translation can affect 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 offered the example of a well established French language site whose publisher adds a German language section of the site with poor autogenerated German language content.

He acknowledged that he knows Google frowns on poor quality translations.

What he wanted to know was whether this poor quality section could bring down the rest of the site or if the negative quality would be isolated to that section of the site.

One Part of Site Can Drag Down Entire Site

John Mueller answered the question as to whether the poor quality would be isolated to one 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.”

 

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