Having a low-quality section of a website indexed and ranked can “pull down” higher quality content published elsewhere and have a negative impact on SEO, according to Google.
In a recent video published on Google Search Central’s YouTube channel, SEO expert John Mueller responded to a question asking whether a poor translation for a new language could affect the rest of the site in terms of search engine rankings.
Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst said that the “short answer is yes”, especially if the lower quality pages or sections of a website are “very visible” in search.
These act as a red flag for Google, with Mueller admitting that it will often lead them to surmise that the site is “not so fantastic as we thought.”
Mueller noted that Google already looks very unfavourably on poor quality translations as they actively hurt the user experience for regional visitors.
However, his comments suggest poor quality content can reverberate beyond a web page and drag down an entire site, even if there is valuable, original content elsewhere.
While Mueller responded specifically to a question about translations, the insights are a useful indicator for how Google analyses site quality and highlight how important content creation and effective SEO are.
Mueller concluded that Google rarely looks for massive red flags for assessing the quality of the site, instead preferring to look at how everything works together.
In this case, poor quality sections could create an imbalance and lead to Google’s systems taking a view that a site has become worse over time.
