Google’s John Mueller said that when the most important pages are bad, it’s a big deal, but when the less important pages are bad, it’s not so bad. So if your homepage is terrible, it’s really not good. But if archived orphaned pages aren’t good, it’s not that big of a deal for Google SEO or ranking purposes.
Here’s what John has to say about Mastodon: handle. “
The question is from Rob Watts and his question didn’t ask exactly this. It was about the worse page percentage, but here’s what he said:
I’ve read that domains are considered to have a certain amount of useless content that can slow down the performance of the entire domain. Is there a scale here? For example, if a domain’s content is x% worse and y% better, then the impact of ranking == normal position – z ?
Also, given the percentage of bad content versus the percentage of good content (5p/95g vs. 60p/40g), is the ranking impact consistent with the percentage of bad versus good content?
Do you have anything to share?
John replied:
Nuance + character limit = hard :). An example is shown below. If your site’s most important page (the home page, for example) is “bad” (in any algorithmic sense), that’s a pretty big deal. It’s no big deal if the same site has a “horrible” random archive page.
There is no absolute “page percentage” number for this. Think, “What would the average user think when they go through/view your site?”
John later said, “It’s not about the number of pages or percentage of pages on the site, because those are very arbitrary metrics. It’s about the big picture of the site.”
That’s right, if the best of your site is really, really bad, it’s not a beginner.
Forum discussion on Mastodon.
