{"id":11802,"date":"2026-07-17T19:49:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T11:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11802"},"modified":"2026-07-17T19:49:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T11:49:56","slug":"google-explains-seo-connection-of-site-quality-to-non-indexed-pages-via-sejournal-martinibuster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11802","title":{"rendered":"Google Explains SEO Connection Of Site Quality To Non-Indexed Pages via @sejournal, @martinibuster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p> <div id=\"narrow-cont\"> <p>Google\u2019s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed the Page Indexing Report and how it could be used to identify indexing issues. Of interest is how they tied quality to indexing, saying that quality isn\u2019t just about the text on a web page.<\/p> <h2>Indexing Happens In Stages<\/h2> <p>Splitt and Mueller were discussing issues that could temporarily affect indexing such as a server not responding, that computers fail, DNS lookups sometimes fail, many reasons for why Google might not be able to crawl a site, then following up with the advice that not everything needs to be investigated.<br \/>Then they mentioned that when a site is new, the Page Indexing Report can show you the various stages of indexing that a page goes through.<\/p> <p><em>Splitt explained how this works:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cAnd also, if you add or change your site, or if your site is very new, then you can actually also use this report to see a little bit how your site goes through the different stages.<\/p> <p>Because at some point, you\u2019re going to see pages in discovered currently not indexed, which tells you we know they exist, but we haven\u2019t actually visited them. And if we haven\u2019t visited them, we can\u2019t put them in the index versus crawled currently not indexed, which means we visited them and we didn\u2019t put them in the index. And that can have all sorts of different reasons.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p><iframe class=\"sej-iframe-auto-height\" id=\"in-content-iframe\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/wp-json\/sscats\/v2\/tk\/Middle_Post_Text\"><\/iframe><\/p> <h2>Lack Of Indexing Not Always A Quality Issue<\/h2> <p>At this point, the conversation turned to quality issues in the context of indexing and how that might have an impact. Mueller confirmed that this is not always about quality.<\/p> <p><em>Splitt asked Mueller about the not indexed status in the Page Indexing Report:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cWould you say that that is often or only sometimes a sign of a quality issue?\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p><em>Mueller answered:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cSometimes.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <h2>Strong Concerns About Quality<\/h2> <p>Mueller explained that the not indexed status can be triggered if Google\u2019s systems are \u201cseriously worried\u201d about quality. That sounds kind of strange for a system to be in a state of worry. What he probably meant is that if quality scores or some other indicator crosses a threshold, this can mean there\u2019s a \u201cconcern\u201d about quality related to the site.<\/p> <p><em>Mueller continued his answer:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cSo, it\u2019s definitely the case if our systems are seriously worried about the quality of the website that they will reduce the number of pages at the index. Because if we have strong concerns about the overall quality, then it doesn\u2019t make much sense for our systems to spend a lot of time on the website.<\/p> <p>So we\u2019ll probably crawl a lot less. We\u2019ll index a lot less. And then you\u2019ll see things like crawled not indexed or discovered not indexed, which from our point of view, is basically our system saying, we know about this and once we\u2019re happy, we will take another look and see if we can index it.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <h2>Page Not Indexed Not Always Because Of A Technical Reason<\/h2> <p>It\u2019s not uncommon for a site owner to consider that there\u2019s nothing wrong with their site, which leads to an inability to diagnose a page quality issue. Nobody knows a site as well as the site owner or the SEO, and they have put the time in to make it as perfect as possible. So it\u2019s understandable that a person is unable to see that there are actual quality issues affecting a site.<\/p> <p>So what happens is that people try to find a technical issue to explain why a site is not getting indexed. When that fails, some people believe they\u2019re victims of negative SEO and begin a cycle of constantly disavowing \u201cbad\u201d links, usually with no improvement.<\/p> <p>If this sounds like your situation, you may need to seriously consider that there is a quality issue affecting the site, which can seem inconceivable because the site is \u201cperfect.\u201d<\/p> <p>Mueller addresses this quality blind-spot that can affect any site owner.<\/p> <p><em>Mueller continued his answer:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cIt\u2019s not so much that I would say you should take these situations and try to fix them. From a technical point of view, it\u2019s not that you need to fix this technical issue that Google is not indexing this page at the moment. But rather, you almost need to\u2026 when you recognize a bigger pattern like this, like Google is not indexing a lot of your pages, and there\u2019s no technical reason, you almost need to take a step back and think about the quality overall.<\/p> <p>And thinking about quality is really challenging because a lot of times, it\u2019s your website, and it\u2019s your baby. And of course, it\u2019s the best baby ever.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <h2>Site Visitors And Overall Quality<\/h2> <p>At this point, Mueller adds something unexpected to the discussion. He mentions how site visitors might take a look at the site and quickly determine that it lacks quality factors like uniqueness. He didn\u2019t say that Google\u2019s systems determined that the site lacks quality; he said that people might be making that determination.<\/p> <p>He didn\u2019t explicitly say that Google was picking up on user signals that are indicative of site quality issues. But it sure sounds like he\u2019s implying it.<\/p> <p><em>Mueller continued his answer:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cBut taking a step back and trying to look at it with the eyes of someone who is not directly involved with your website, sometimes that opens up some ideas for areas where you can improve, where maybe if most of your website is AI generated and it worked for a while, it might be that people look at this AI generated site and they\u2019re like, well, I can tell this is AI generated, there\u2019s nothing unique or valuable that is available here for me.<\/p> <p>That\u2019s not to say that all AI-generated content is bad, but sometimes you just run across websites where you\u2019re like, anyone could have written this. This tells me nothing.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p>Martin Splitt commented on how hard it is to recognize that your best effort may not be as perfect as it seems.<\/p> <p><em>Splitt said:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cYeah, that\u2019s true.<\/p> <p>And I think what makes this difficult is not only the fact that obviously the way you wrote it is the way you thought is best, and that\u2019s why you think it\u2019s high quality, of course. So that\u2019s really, really hard to kind of step out of your own perspective.<\/p> <p>But sometimes it\u2019s also there\u2019s so much other stuff that is just as good. So why would we add it to the index?<\/p> <p>And then that can tell you like, maybe this content isn\u2019t as valuable as I thought, it is because other people are covering the same thing. And then what\u2019s the value of this version of it being in the index?\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <h2>Overall Quality Is Not Just About Text<\/h2> <p><em>Mueller responded to Splitt by mentioning that quality is not always about text.<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cI feel we could have a whole podcast about quality. I think maybe one other thing that is worth mentioning with regards to quality is it\u2019s not just the text. So a lot of times people will say like, well, my text is unique or my articles are good.<\/p> <p>And they\u2019re packaged in a page that is terrible to access where anyone who, when they try to load it, like their computer fan spins up and they\u2019re like, oh my gosh, I have to run away to make sure my computer doesn\u2019t explode. So maybe that\u2019s an extreme case.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p><strong>If you only have one takeaway from this podcast, this should be it:<\/strong> Mueller says that quality is more than just text.\u00a0 He said that how a user experiences a web page can also be a part of quality.<\/p> <h2>User Experience And Quality Issues<\/h2> <p>Mueller offered examples of the kinds of non-text quality issues that can negatively impact the user experience. He did not say that these issues can cause a person to abandon the site, but the examples he shared are the kinds of things that may cause a site visitor to hit their back button to get away from the web page.<\/p> <p>This is interesting because this is the kind of thing that can be detected, a user behavior signal. He used the example of a recipe site that frustrates its site visitors by making it difficult to find the recipe. That\u2019s an example of a poor user experience as evidence of a quality issue.<\/p> <p>Mueller in fact calls out user experience by name, saying that they almost have to take the \u201cfull experience\u201d into consideration for quality.<\/p> <p><em>He continued:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cBut you\u2019ve all seen these pages where basically the text is there, but it\u2019s almost hidden away, hidden behind ads, hidden behind interstitials, hidden behind other things that are moving and coming and going, maybe hidden below a bunch of filler content, which we sometimes see, for example, with recipes where there\u2019s this really long story on top that maybe most people don\u2019t really care about, and then the recipe comes.<\/p> <p>These are all the kind of things where the overall quality is much more than just that piece of text that you say, like, this is my main content, this is what Google should be counting for my site.<\/p> <p>And from our point of view, we almost have to take into account the full experience on a page because that\u2019s what users see.<\/p> <p>It\u2019s not that users go to a web page and turn on some magic mode that just pulls out the text but rather they have the full experience of this website with all of the 3D, 4D animations and everything.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <h2>Takeaways<\/h2> <ul> <li>Google may reduce crawling and indexing when its systems have strong concerns about a website\u2019s overall quality.<\/li> <li>Site owners and SEOs should investigate quality issues when pages are unindexed and there are no technical issues to blame.<\/li> <li>Quality is partly about whether pages offer unique and useful information. In my opinion, unique doesn\u2019t mean that the words are literally different from another site. Unique means the topic, the coverage, all elements of the content and how it is presented to the user.<\/li> <li>Slop content, both AI-generated and human-generated slop, may trigger a quality problem which manifests in the form of site visitors abandoning the page.<\/li> <li>Google considers the full page experience, including accessibility, performance, ads, interstitials, filler content, and how easily users can reach the information they need.<\/li> <\/ul> <p>Google\u2019s John Mueller explained that widespread indexing problems can reflect concerns about a site\u2019s overall quality. He implied that the user experience is a factor that can influence indexing. The point to be considered is that technical issues may not be the reason why a site is not indexed and that text is not always the reason either, which ties into the user experience.<\/p> <p><em>Featured Image by Shutterstock\/JHVEPhoto<\/em><\/p> <\/div> <p>News,SEO#Google #Explains #SEO #Connection #Site #Quality #NonIndexed #Pages #sejournal #martinibuster1784288996<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google\u2019s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed the Page Indexing Report and how it could be used to identify indexing issues. Of interest is how they tied quality to indexing, saying that quality isn\u2019t just about the text on a web page. Indexing Happens In Stages Splitt and Mueller were discussing issues that could temporarily [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[9415,211,75,415,46816,4569,738,80,97,420],"class_list":["post-11802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-connection","tag-explains","tag-google","tag-martinibuster","tag-nonindexed","tag-pages","tag-quality","tag-sejournal","tag-seo","tag-site"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}