One SEO professional returned to the John Mueller hangout regarding a question they had asked some time ago regarding old, nefarious domains.
They had posted about a domain with a history as an escort service provider.
At the time, John’s answer was that they just need patience and time. But they also wanted to ask some follow-up questions.
Basically, the domain had a long history because the first snapshot of the page of that website is from 1997.
So it’s a really long history and they relaunched their site in June of last year. So, this is very new and fresh. And the main issue that they are having is that they are still getting flagged.
Additionally, they have another issue that John already mentioned here today, that things are crawled but currently not indexed.
And they are trying to understand if the history of the domain would affect this, because they are having major issues with indexing.
They do believe that the content they are publishing is of high quality, is internally linked, and they have also tried to build a quality site.
But, where they struggle right now is with page performance. The optimization for this is in progress. However, they do use pre-render and Google does index the pre-rendered version.
So when it comes to their Lighthouse score, it’s all good. They are just wanting some advice on how they can improve so they can understand why they are not getting indexed right now.
John answered that usually the indexing side of things would not be related to bad content on the site.
The indexing side may be affected if the content that was on there before was very spammy.
So this is potentially something where Google may be, from an indexing point of view, it just takes a while for Google to figure out that “Oh, this new website may not actually be spammy at all.”
However, if it were just purely about adult content being there before, then John could imagine that perhaps their Safe Search filters are being slower in recognizing that.
John does know that they have taken some steps to make Safe Search less of an issue in that regard.
Perhaps, however, they need to make Safe Search filters faster.
This happens at approximately the 49:31 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 7 49:31
All right. So, hi. So I have a follow-up question on the answer that you gave us actually, during the previous meeting. So we posted a question about a domain with a history as an escort service provider. So you answered that what we need is patience and time. But I wanted to ask some follow-up questions.
So basically, the domain has a long history because the first snapshot of the page of that website is from 1997. So it is a really long history, where actually we relaunched our website in June last year. So it’s very new and fresh. And the main issue that we are having, is like as in the message we stated, that we still are getting flagged.
And additionally, we have this issue that you already mentioned here today, a crawled currently not indexed. And we are trying to understand if the history of the domain can actually affect that we are having issues with indexing.
And answering the questions from your blog, we do believe that the content we are publishing is a good quality. It is internally linked, and we do build, like, we try to build a quality site. Where we struggled at the moment is page performance. So it’s kind of in progress at the moment to optimize for that. But we use pre-rendered [inaudible]. So kind of what we show for Google is already a pre-rendered version.
So when it comes to our Lighthouse score, it’s all good. So if you could give us maybe some advice, like what can we improve or look for to understand like, why are we not getting indexed? I’m happy to share the URL as well.
John 51:17
Yeah, if you can drop the URL into the chat, I can take a look at that. And pass that on to the team probably. If you have a bit of time afterwards, after we have gone through the questions, I can double-check maybe some first things as well. So kind of like to see if, if there’s something super obvious that I can help with.
SEO Professional 7 51:39
Alright, that will be great.
John 51:41
Yeah, and usually the indexing side of things would not be related to kind of like if there was adult content on the website before. The indexing side might be affected if the content that was on there before was very spammy.
So that might be something where we’re kind of like, from an indexing point of view, it just takes a while to figure out, oh, this, this new website is actually not spammy at all. But if it was just purely that there was adult content there before, then I could imagine that maybe our safe search filters are a little bit kind of slow in recognizing that.
I do know, we’ve taken some steps to make that faster. But maybe we need to make that even faster. Or maybe there’s something else on the Safe Search side that is kind of sticking. The Safe Search side is something that you can check if you do a site query and then turn SafeSearch on and off.
You should be able to see if there is something from Safe Search happening or not. You don’t see that with regards to indexing. So, I can take a look at this afterwards. And we can see if there’s something super obvious that I can let you know about.
