In John Mueller’s 09/17/2021 hangout, a webmaster was worried about new pages they added to their site—generally, much younger pages. They were also worried about how they impacted site quality.
He was curious about what the overall effect was regarding the quality of the newer pages vs. older pages.
John advised it’s a process that takes a lot of time. There’s a long lead time when you add pages to sites that already have thousands of pages. Google has to understand those in the context of all of the very old pages vs. the brand-new ones that were just added.
This discussion occurs at the 15:20 point in the video:
John Mueller 09/17/2021 Hangout Transcript
Hey, John, I, just a couple of questions. You said quite a few times, you can’t just work on a page or a set of pages, that won’t necessarily be enough to get them ranking, getting them ranking well if the rest of the website isn’t doing well. So my question is around, I suppose specifically, the algorithms with new pages, you know, much younger pages on the website, when Google comes along and crawls and looks to understand it, does it then compare those pages to older legacy pages on the site and say, “Okay, well, yeah, these pages are great, but these much older pages are actually rubbish”?
So that will then affect the quality of the, you know, the newer pages and the category pages? Is that something that the algorithms do to, I guess, to really understand the quality of a website?
John 16:15
I guess, in some sense, that could be happening. I mean, what usually happens is when we try to understand the quality of a website overall, it’s just a process that takes a lot of time. And it has, I don’t know, a fairly long lead time there. So if you add, I don’t know, 5 pages to a website that has 10,000 pages already, then we’re going to probably focus on most of this site first, and then over time, we will see how that kind of settles down with the new content there as well. So I guess that kind of goes in the direction that you’re asking.
