How to Trigger a Sitewide Quality Re-evaluation?
Google’s John Mueller answered the question about how to get Google to conduct a sitewide quality re-evaluation. Google’s Mueller discussed how Google’s sitewide re-evaluation process works.
How to Tell Google a Site Quality Re-evaluation is Needed?
The person asking the question offered examples of when a sitewide quality re-evaluation was needed and asked how can publishers let Google know that major changes have occurred requiring such an evaluation.
So, rather than passively wait for Google to crawl a site and encounter a major change during the course of a regular crawling and indexing, the person asking the question wanted to know how they could give notice that a major change has happened and to put a site re-evaluation into motion.
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.”
Google’s John Mueller Explains Sitewide Quality Evaluations
No Technical Way to Trigger a Re-evaluation
Mueller first said there’s nothing on the webmaster side for triggering a sitewide re-evaluation and he said that it was not usually necessary because site changes are being continually 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
Mueller next outlined scenarios where a major quality re-evaluation may be needed.
“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 times when publishers make major changes to a site and it might be useful for Google, site visitors and the publisher if there was a way to trigger a major re-evaluation if the entire site has gone through an abrupt change.
Typical situations might be when a website changes domains, changes a CMS, site structure, or a major content quality change.
It might not have to be a directive type of tool but rather like a raised hand to signal to Google that something major has happened.
Google might argue that it’s not necessary but it might make some publishers feel more comfortable if the option to pass the feedback along was there.
How do you feel about it?
Should Google have a site quality re-evaluation tool?
Citation
How to Trigger Site-wide Quality Re-evaluation?
Watch John Mueller answer the question at the 32:53 minute mark:
