Part of the site can affect the overall site quality

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about a bad translation on a website. He extended his answer to the question of how Google rates a website in terms of quality if a section of it is of poor quality.

While the question is about a section of a site that has poor translation, Mueller’s answer sheds light on how site quality, even in a section of a site, can affect the entire website and rankings.

Section of a low quality website

The questioner wanted to know whether a bad translation can affect an entire website.

He asked:

“I wonder whether a bad translation of a new language version can negatively affect the SEO for (the) more established main language versions of the domain.”

Then he cited the example of a well-established French-language site whose publisher is adding a German-language section to the site with poor auto-generated German-language content.

He acknowledged that he knows that Google frowns on poor quality translations.

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He wanted to know if this poor quality section could freeze the rest of the site or if it would isolate the negative quality to that section of the site.

Related: Using Google Translate to Automatically Generate Content?

Part of the site can pull down the entire site

John Mueller answered the question of whether the poor quality would be isolated to one section of a site.

Müller:

“I think the short answer is yes.

The main problem is less that they are translated versions of the content, but more that for some things we are looking at the overall quality of the website.

And when we look at the quality of the site as a whole, it doesn’t matter to us why they should be lower quality when you have substantial lower quality parts.

If it’s just bad translations, or if it’s terrible content or whatever.

But if we see that there are significant parts that are of lesser quality then we might think that overall this website is not as fantastic as we thought.

And that can have an impact in different places on the website.

In short, I think if you have a very poor quality translation that is also indexed and that is also highly visible in the search it can definitely also detract from the good translation or the high quality original content that you have too. “

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Related: 50 questions to ask yourself in order to evaluate the quality of your website

No big red flags for site quality

Sometimes we look for big red flags to get noticed, but John Mueller explains that when it comes to website quality, it’s a matter of many things working together, such as: B. Signals to indicate whether the website is high or low quality.

The person asked a follow-up question about translations and Mueller started talking about the overall quality rating of the website.

He described how many different aspects of a low quality website can work together to contribute to a negative quality rating of the entire website by Google.

Müller explained:

“At least as I understand it, we are more concerned with understanding the quality of the website as a whole.

And that’s usually not where it’s about individual things that we could just point to and say, oh, if you have five misspellings on a page, that’s a low quality sign.

These things happen individually.

And I think all of these factors are hard to say individually, that they are a sign that something is of poor quality, but we have to put it all together and then figure out what the mix is.

And that’s also a reason why sometimes, when you improve the overall quality of a website significantly, or when it gets significantly worse, it just takes a long time for our systems to figure out how oh, overall, this website’s view is better or worse now .

From this point of view, we have nothing concrete to point out. “

Overall quality of the website

Mueller has talked a lot about the overall site quality over the past year and it has been very fascinating to learn about, especially considering so many report that their content is not indexed.

I think an important takeaway is that there isn’t a big red flag to point out that is responsible for the negative website quality. Rather, it is much that works together to signal a qualitative overall impression.