How to start a Sitewide Quality Re-evaluation?
Google’s John Mueller discusses frequent quality evaluations and what might cause a sitewide quality re-evaluation.
John Mueller of Google responded to a query on how to persuade Google to undertake a sitewide quality re-evaluation. Mueller from Google explained how Google’s sitewide re-evaluation process works.
How to Tell Google a Site Quality Re-evaluation is Needed?
The individual who raised the question provided examples of when a sitewide quality re-evaluation was required and inquired as to how publishers may notify Google that significant changes have happened necessitating such an examination.
So, rather of passively waiting for Google to scan a site and discover a big change during routine crawling and indexing, the individual asking the question wanted to know how they might notify Google of a major change and initiate a site re-evaluation.
This is the question that was asked:
“What are some things that a webmaster can do to trigger a site-wide re-evaluation from a quality point of view.
Like when you change domains or when does Google say, okay… let’s try to collect new signals and see whether the site is better from a quality point of view.”
No Technical Way to Trigger a Re-evaluation
Mueller originally stated that there is nothing on the webmaster side that will prompt a sitewide re-evaluation, and that it is not generally necessary because site updates are constantly updated in the index.
John Mueller offered his answer:
“I don’t think there is anything technical that you can do to… trigger a re-evaluation.
And usually that’s also not necessary because essentially our systems re-evaluate all the time.
They look at the content that we found for a site and over time as we see that change we will take that into account.
So that’s not something where you kind of have to do something manually to trigger that.”
Major Site Changes Require a Re-evaluation
“The one time where we do have to kind of reconsider how the site works is if the site does a serious restructuring of its website where it changes a lot of the URLs and all of the internal links change, where maybe you move from one CMS to another CMS and everything changes and looks different.
Then from a quality point of view or from a technical point of view, we can’t just keep the old understanding of the site, of the pages, because everything is different now.
So we kind of have to rethink all of that. But that’s also not something that is triggered by anything specific but rather it’s just well lots of things have changed on the site and even to kind of incrementally keep up we have to do a lot of incremental changes to re-evaluate that.”
Should Google Search Console Offer a Re-evaluation Tool?
There are occasions when publishers make significant changes to a site, and it would be beneficial for Google, site users, and the publisher if there was a mechanism to initiate a big re-evaluation if the entire site has undergone a significant change.
Typical scenarios include a website changing domains, a CMS, site structure, or a significant change in content quality. It does not have to be a directing tool, but rather a raised hand to alert Google that something significant has occurred.
Google may claim that it isn’t required, but it may make some publishers feel more at ease if the opportunity to share criticism was available.
What are your thoughts about it? Should Google have a tool for re-evaluating site quality?
