Google’s John Mueller answered a question about poor website translation. He expanded his answer to solve the problem of how Google evaluates the quality of a website when a part of the website is of poor quality.
Although the question is about poor translation of a certain part of the website, Mueller’s answer provides insights into how the quality of the website (even a part of the website) affects the overall website and ranking.
Low-quality parts of the site
The person who asked the question wanted to know whether a bad translation would affect the entire website.
he asks:
“I want to know whether a bad translation of a new language version will Search Engine Optimization For (the) domain more mature main language version. “
He then provided an example of a complete French website. The publisher of the website added the German part of the website, but the automatically generated German content was poor.
He admitted that he knew that Google was dismissive of low-quality translations.
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What he wants to know is whether this low-quality part will affect the rest of the website, or whether the negative quality will be isolated to that part of the website.
related: Use Google Translate to automatically generate content?
Part of the site can be dragged down the entire site
John Mueller answered the question whether poor quality will be isolated to a part of the site.
Mueller:
“I think the short answer is yes.
The main problem is not the translated version of these content, but in some respects, we look at the overall quality of the website.
Ans When we look at the overall quality of the website, if you have a large part of it low quality, then it doesn’t matter to us why they are low quality.
If they are just bad translations, or if they are bad content or something.
However, if we find that there are important parts of low quality, then we might think that the website overall is not as good as we thought.
This may have an impact in different places throughout the website.
In short, I think if your translation quality is very low, but it is also indexed and is also obvious in search, then it will definitely pull down the good quality translation or the high quality original content that you also have. “
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related: 50 questions you must ask when evaluating website quality
There is no big red flag for website quality
Sometimes we look for prominent red flags, but John Mueller explained that in terms of site quality, this is a problem of many things, such as signals, to indicate whether the site is high-quality or low-quality.
This person asked a follow-up question about translation, and Mueller started talking about the overall website quality assessment.
He described how many different low-quality aspects of a website can work together, leading to Google’s negative quality assessment of the entire website.
Mueller explained:
“So at least in the way I understand it, it’s more of us trying to understand the overall quality of the website.
This is usually not an individual thing that we can point to and say, for example, oh, if there are five spelling errors on the page, it is a low-quality logo.
These things happen alone.
I think all of these factors alone are hard to say that they are signs of low quality, but we have to put everything together and find out what is mixed together.
This is why sometimes when you significantly improve the overall quality of the website or when things get significantly worse, our system takes a lot of time to figure out. Overall, the view of the website is now better or worse.
Therefore, from this perspective, it is not that we have any specific content that can be pointed out. “
Overall website quality
For the past year, Mueller has been talking about the overall quality of the site, and it is very interesting to understand this, especially considering that so many people report that their content is not indexed.
I think an important conclusion is that there is no big specific red flag that can point to the responsibility of negative website quality. On the contrary, it is a combination of multiple factors to express the overall impression of quality.
A low-quality area can damage the entire site
Watch the minute mark at 6:53
