Another SEO professional was concerned about how John had previously referenced “improving the quality of your website.”
They wondered if there’s something that is physically quantifiable in this regard? Or is this just referring to how many different algorithms may look at a website?
John replied that it’s not exactly quantifiable in the sense that you would have a quality score for search, like you would for ads.
They have many different algorithms that they use in order to judge the quality of any specific website.
It’s not just a single number or anything similar.
He also added that sometimes he talks to the search quality team to see if there’s a quality metric that they could use in search.
On the one hand, they would have a quality metric that they could show users. Conversely, the metric would be entirely different from what’s actually used in search in order to prevent abuse.
Because of this, any quality metric that they would show in search is something that could be misleading, because it’s not something that is actually contributing to search rankings.
He does think that there may be some sort of measure of site quality in search console, however.
This happens at approximately the 34:41 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (34:41)
When you say improve the quality of your website, is this quality something that is quantifiable? Or is it simply a term used to determine how multiple algorithms look at your website?
John (34:53)
I don’t think it’s quite quantifiable in the sense that we have a quality score like you might have for ads, when it comes to web search. And we have lots of different algorithms that try to understand the quality of a website, so it’s not just one number, or anything like that. From time to time I talk with the search quality team to see if there’s some quality metric that we could show, for example, in Search Console.
But it’s super tricky, because we could create separate quality metrics to show in Search Console. But then that’s not the quality metric that we actually use for search. So it’s kind of almost misleading. And if we were to show exactly the quality metric that we use, then on the one hand, that opens things up a little bit for abuse, and on the other hand, it makes it a lot harder for the teams internally to work on improving this metric.
So that’s kind of the tricky balance there. I don’t know at some point, maybe we’ll still have some measure of quality in Search Console, though.
