Google's John Mueller replied to a question around indexing issues on a site and said that if the site is hosted on a strong platform and is technically sound, and "it's barely getting indexed, often that's a sign that our systems aren't convinced about the site overall."
John wrote this on Bluesky:
If you're hosting your site on a strong hosting platform, in a technically valid way (which you can test for), and it's barely getting indexed, often that's a sign that our systems aren't convinced about the site overall.
Just to step back, this is not new. John and Google representatives have said this before. Google spoke about being on the edge of indexing because of being on the edge of Google's quality threshold. He has said that if you find yourself needing to often submit your URLs to the index manually, that can be a sign of quality issues. Low quality content that is not indexed is not surprising to Googlers. Pages that may be deindexed, may be deindexed over quality issues. Google has said a page needs to pass quality to be indexed. Google has been saying they do not index everything for years, Google simply won't index all your pages and it is impossible for Google to index everything, Google said.
John then went on to talk about the type of content this site is publishing, he wrote:
These situations are always hard. If you've recently moved to this domain, sometimes it takes time to settle down. I wonder (without an official-Google hat on) if the strategy of creating "SEO content" lightly related to the topic of your actual business is ideal - will people really convert?Obviously every site & business is different (looking at those reading on SER,SEL,SEJ,etc), it just sometimes feels like folks focus on building out a topic, ranking pages for the topic, when their business is actually not directly tied to random web traffic for that topic.
I guess John reads this site. :)
In any event - none of this should surprise any of you but it has been a while since John spoke about quality and indexing.
Here is a screenshot of this conversation, so you have the full context:
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
