Google's John Mueller said that the search engine does not classify the type of site you are based on the technology platform or infrastructure it uses. So if you use WordPress for your site, it doesn't mean Google will say your site is a blog. If you use WooCommerce, Google won't automatically say your site is e-commerce related.
John said Google determines what your site's intent is about based on the content on the page and how that page is structured. But Google does not base that on the infrastructure you use.
John was asked this at the 43:22 mark:
How does Google search engine differentiate between e-commerce website and informational website? Is it from the plugins installed or from the CMS or from the website structure? We want to use WooCommerce plugin for a specific purpose other than e-commerce, we don't want to sell any products. Will the WooCommerce installation classify your website as an e-commerce website?
John said "we don't classify websites based on the infrastructure that they use." "You can use essentially an e-commerce site set up for posting your blog posts if you want. It's probably not very suitable for things like that but you could if you wanted to. And if we see that we will say well this page has a lot of content on this specific topic we will rank this page based on this content," John added.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is the transcript:
How does Google search engine differentiate between e-commerce website and informational website? Is it from the plugins installed or from the CMS or from the website structure? We want to use WooCommerce plugin for a specific purpose other than e-commerce, we don't want to sell any products. Will the WooCommerce installation classify your website as an e-commerce website?So we don't classify websites based on the infrastructure that they use. And I sometimes get this question with regards to blogs, it's like i want to publish an article and i do it in Wordpress does this mean that Google thinks that my article is a blog post?
Like we don't have this notion of trying to understand what what type of content something is just based on the infrastructure that it uses. You can use essentially an e-commerce site set up for posting your blog posts if you want. It's probably not very suitable for things like that but you could if you wanted to. And if we see that we will say well this page has a lot of content on this specific topic we will rank this page based on this content.
So from that point of view if you want to use a specific infrastructure which you think works well for your website then go for it. It's not going to be the case that we will say oh your website uses this infrastructure so it must be this kind of a website, that's not the case. We essentially look at the pages that we see there and based on the content that we find on those pages, based on that we do we try to classify these individual pages. And even then it's not the case that we would say oh this is an e-commerce page or this is an article page but rather we would try to figure out what intent does this page cover and how does that map to the search results. Like if someone is looking to buy something specific and we see it's a product page, then we might say well this covers this kind of like user wants to buy something intent fairly well, therefore we'll rank it.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
