John received a submitted question during a Google hangout about whether or not there is a history after technical repairs.
Specifically, the SEO professional was asking whether there are situations where Google would negate any possibility of a site’s authority being recovered, even when the cause has been rectified.
John explained that Google has no such history, or memory, and does not hold a grudge against a website because of being a bad website.
Basically, once technical issues are fixed, they will evaluate a site based on the fact that the technical issues were repaired.
When it comes to technical things, if they can’t crawl a website for a while, they may not have that information to show.
When it comes back, they will show it again. This is something that Google will pick up instantly.
John also expounded upon this with the fact that the internet itself can be very flaky.
Sites may go down, and sometimes sites go down for a week or even longer. Nothing may have changed content-wise, but they repair the servers. Then the site comes back up.
John explains it’s tricker when addressing site quality in general. When assessing the overall quality and relevance of any particular site, it’s not easy. This takes a lot of time for Google to understand how a site fits into the rest of the internet.
This means that it can easily take one to six months, and sometimes longer than half a year for Google to recognize and identify changes in overall site quality.
The reason behind this is because, in addition to one website, Google also has to evaluate how this site stacks up against the rest of the overall web.
This is what takes so much time for Google to evaluate and rank a website, even after quality changes have been made.
This happens at approximately the 22:27 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 22:27
Are there any situations where Google negates a site’s authority that can’t be recovered, even if the cause has been rectified? So assuming the cause was a short, team turbulence with technical issues, or content changes, how long for Google to reassess the website and fully restore authority, search position, and traffic? Does Google have a memory as such?
John (Answer) 23:00
So for technical things, I would say we pretty much have no memory, in the sense that if we can’t crawl a website for a while, or if something goes missing for a while, and it comes back, then we have that content again. We have that information again. We can show that again, that’s something that pretty much picks up instantly, and this is something that I think we have to have because the internet is sometimes very flaky. And sometimes sites go offline for a week or even longer, and they come back and they’re like, nothing has changed, but they fix the servers. And we have to deal with that and users are still looking for those websites.
I think it’s a lot trickier when it comes to things around quality in general, where assessing the overall quality and relevance of a website is not very easy. And it takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the internet. And that means on the one hand, it takes a lot of time for us to recognize that maybe something is not as good as we thought it was. And similarly, it takes a lot of time for us to learn the opposite. And that’s something that can easily take, I don’t know, a couple of months, half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality. Because we essentially watch out for, well, how does this website fit in with the context of the overall web. And that just takes a lot of time.
So that’s something where I would say compared to technical issues, it takes a lot longer for things to be refreshed in that regard. The other thing that I’ve very, very rarely seen is that a site gets stuck in some kind of a weird in between stage in our systems. In that, I don’t know, at some point our algorithms reviewed the website and found it to be absolutely terrible. And for whatever reason, those parts of the algorithms just took a very long time to be updated again. And sometimes that can be several years.
But I mean, these are things that I’ve seen every now and then, but they’re extremely rare. So the chances of any random website kind of falling into this is fairly low. But it is something where if you struggle, and you really see that you’re doing a lot of things right, and nothing seems to be working, then, like, do reach out to us and see if there’s something on our side that might be stuck.
But I would say, like at least technical things, they resolve very quickly. Kind of the, I don’t know, weird things stuck in the algorithms side, I would say that that’s a lot rarer nowadays, but especially if something happened, I don’t know, 5, 10 years ago, and your site is kind of stuck in a weird limbo state, then that’s something where, like reaching out and seeing if there’s something weird, is always worthwhile.
