Google's John Mueller was asked in this past Friday's Google Search Central SEO office hours if Google has different levels of site quality demotions. John Mueller of Google basically said no, that it is "more fluid" than that.
The question was asked at the 13:11 mark into the video:
What are the levels of site quality demotions? Is there like a first level where everything site-wide looks fine, no demotion. Second level that you demote some pages that are not relevant or third level site-wide is not good at all.
John said "we don't have kind of these different levels of site-wide demotion." He said Google tries to "look at it as granular as possible" but when it can't Google will "look at kind of like different chunks of a website." John added "So that's something where from from our side it's not so much that we have different categories which stage like in this category or in that category. It's just that there's almost like a fluid transition across the web."
The answer honestly was not super clear, but here is the transcript and the video:
So from from my understanding is we don't have kind of these different levels of site-wide demotion where we would say it's like we need to demote everything on the website or we don't don't need to demote anything on the website. I think depending on the website you might see aspects like this or might feel like aspects like this but for the most part we do try to look at it as granular as possible and in some cases we can't look at it as granular as possible, so we'll look at kind of like different chunks of a website.So that's something where from from our side it's not so much that we have different categories which stage like in this category or in that category. It's just that there's almost like a fluid transition across the web.
And also when it comes to things where our algorithms might say oh we we don't really know how to trust this it's uh for the most part it's not a matter of trust is there or trust is not there, it's like yes or no. But rather we we have this really kind of fluid transition where we think well we're not completely sure about this but it makes sense for these kind of queries for example or makes sense for these kind of queries.
So that's something where there's like a lot of uh a lot of room.
John Mueller responded to my tweet on this:
Yeah, pretty much. Manual actions can be anything from quite broad to quite specific, and very fluid in between. The goal is always to neutralize the issue, and sometimes that's easy to isolate & do, other times it's much harder, so we end up taking broader action.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 8, 2021
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
