Improving the quality of the “most important” pages on a website should be the top priority for SEOs, according to Google’s search engine expert, John Mueller.
Responding to a question about unhelpful content and whether lower-quality pages can negatively affect the performance of a domain, Mueller admitted “terrible” pillar pages can be disastrous.
Mueller said it would be a “pretty big deal” if a home page or key product page was deemed to be of poor quality by any of Google’s ranking signals.
This is because they contribute heavily to the “bigger picture” of a site and are more frequently visited by users.
Placing emphasis on creating optimised, engaging content for these important pages should be the focus for SEOs then.
Conversely, Mueller went on to say that lower quality archive pages wouldn’t have as big an impact on the overall quality of a domain.
He also said there isn’t a ratio of “good” to “poor” quality of pages that webmasters can target to ensure they are not penalised by the algorithm.
Mueller noted: “It’s really not a matter of number of pages or percentage of pages on a site, since those are such arbitrary metrics. It’s really more about the bigger picture for the site.”
The main takeaway is that getting your content marketing right for your best pages is critical to success in search engine rankings.
Any core pages with thin content and slow load times are essentially
