Google Explains SEO Impact Of Adding New Topics via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Danny Sullivan discussed what happens when a website begins publishing content on a topic that’s different from the one in which it had gained a sitewide reputation. His comments were made at Search Central Live NYC, as part of a wide-ranging discussion about site reputation.

Danny said that introducing a new topic to a website won’t result in the site taking a hit in rankings. But what could happen is that Google might try to figure out how that content fits into the rest of the site.

Here’s what Danny said:

“We have long done work and are going to continue doing that to understand if parts of the site seem to be independent or starkly different than other parts of the site. It is not bad to have a website do whatever you want the website to do for your readers. It’s not bad that you started off covering one thing and you start writing about something else.

I had one person at an event who was very, very concerned. They started writing about snowboards but now wanted to start writing about skis and was terrified.

That if they write about skiing that somehow the topic of the website and the focus will somehow… it doesn’t work that way.

We’re not kind of building it up on the expertise you have in this particular thing, that type of thing, but what we are trying to understand is if the site seems to be different in some way from other parts of the site.”

It Doesn’t Work That Way

What Danny is saying is that Google looks at how different one part of a site is from another. And if another part is vastly different, he went on to say that sometimes it may rank well for a time based on the reputation of the entire site for the main topic but then the new section may lose rankings.

Danny explained that the loss in rankings is not a penalty but rather it’s just a recognition that a section of a site is so vastly different that the reputation of the entire site doesn’t really apply for that particular topic.

Danny used the metaphor of a “mini-site” to explain how Google might split off the reputation of a new section of a site from the rest of the site so that it can earn reputation for its topic. More about the mini-site metaphor here.

It makes sense that Google would differentiate the different parts of a site because it allows it to understand that a collection of pages is on one topic and another collection of pages within the website are about a different topic.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Rene Jansa

Google On Negative Authorship Signal And Mini-Site Reputation via @sejournal, @martinibuster

At the recent Search Central Live NYC event, Danny Sullivan discussed what happens when a site begins publishing vastly different content on a site and how that may affect rankings, introducing the concept of a mini-site as a metaphor for dividing the reputation of a site. He also discussed the concept of negative authorship authority, which some SEOs believe follows authors from penalized websites and can negatively affect the other sites they publish on.

Negative Authorship Reputation

Danny initially discussed a negative authorship signal that some in the SEO community believe can follow an author from site to site. The idea is that an author of content that is banned on one site will also have their content banned on another site. He denied that Google tracked author authority signals from site to site.

Sullivan explained:

“If you wrote for a site that got a manual action, it doesn’t somehow infect the other site that you might work for later on, so again, this is not something that freelancers should be worried about.

If you’re a publication and for whatever reason you feel like employing a freelancer, and it makes sense, that’s fine. You don’t need to worry about who they worked for before.

And if you are a freelancer you do not need to go back to the publications and say, can you take my byline down because now I can’t get hired from anybody else because they think I’m going to infect them. It is not like that. It’s not a disease. “

The above SEO myth likely began when publishers noticed that content created by a certain author across multiple sites was banned. In that case, it’s reasonable to assume that there was something wrong with the content but that’s not necessarily true. It could have been the case that the website itself was poorly promoted with unnatural links. Or, it could be that the site itself was engaged with selling links.

The takeaway from what Danny Sullivan shared is that a manual action on one site doesn’t follow an author to another site. Another takeaway is that there is no negative authorship signal that Google is tracking.

And if there’s no negative authorship signal could it be that there is no positive author signal as well? In my opinion it’s a reasonable assumption. A signal like that would be too easy to manipulate. Whatever signals Google uses to understand site reputation is likely enough for the purpose of citing an information source in the search results.

Although claims by some SEOs have been made about authorship signals, authorship signals have never been known to be a thing with Google’s algorithms. Google has a long history of denying the use of authorship signals and Danny’s statements offer further validation that Google continues to not use authorship as signals for ranking purposes.

Ranking Drops And Mini-Site Reputation

Danny next begins talking about how a new section of a site could suddenly lose rankings. He says this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just Google trying to figure out this new section and that if it’s sufficiently different Google could even start treating it as a standalone mini-site. This is a really fascinating thing he gets into here.

Danny used the example of the addition of a forum to a website.

Danny explained

“For example, you might have a site where you start running a forum. Forums can be different and we would want to understand that this looks like a forum so that we can then rank the forum content against other kinds of forum content on kind of a level playing field or understand that that forum content should be included in things where we try to show forum content.”

What can happen is… that it could be that part of your site was doing better because it was seen as part of the overall site. Now we kind of see it as more of independent and part of a full site on its own.

And potentially you could see a traffic drop that comes from that. That doesn’t mean that you suddenly got a site reputation abuse ban issue because first of all that might not have involved third party content abusing first party work, right? Those were the things. So if it doesn’t have any of that it doesn’t have anything to do with that.Secondly, we would have sent you an email. So, it’s not bad.

Because it just could be we’ve had a general re-ranking… It could also mean that in the long run that part of your site might actually do better, because we might recognize it in different ways, that we might be able to surface it in different ways. And it might start sort of earning its own like ‘mini-site’ reputation along the way.”

Three things to take away from that last part.

A ranking drop could be due to benign things, don’t always assume that a ranking drop is due to a spam or other negative algorithmic action.

Second, a rankings drop could be due to a “general re-ranking” which is a vague term that went unexplained but is probably a reference to minor ranking adjustments outside of a core algorithm update.

The third takeaway is the part about a section of a website earning it’s own “mini-site” reputation. I think SEOs should not create theories about mini-sites and mini-site reputations because that’s not what Danny Sullivan said. He used the word “like” which means that he likely used the phrase “mini-site” as a metaphor.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Joseph Hendrickson