Google Cautions: Exponential Content Growth Causes Re-Evaluation via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google's John Mueller says that an exponential growth in content can trigger a re-evaluation The post Google Cautions: Exponential Content Growth Causes Re-Evaluation appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Jul 23, 2024 - 21:04

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Google Cautions: Exponential Content Growth Causes Re-Evaluation via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google's John Mueller says that an exponential growth in content will cause it to be seen as a new site and be re-evaluated

Google advises that an exponential growth in content can trigger a re-evaluation

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the impact of increasing a website’s size by ten times its original size. Mueller’s answer should give pause to anyone considering making their site dramatically larger, as it will cause Google to see it as a brand new website and trigger a re-evaluation.

Impact Of Making A Site Bigger

One of the reasons for a site migration is joining two websites into one website, which can cause a site to become even larger. Another reason for an increase in size is the addition of a massive amount of new products.

This is the question that was asked in the SEO Office Hours podcast:

“What’s the impact of a huge expansion of our product portfolio on SEO Performance, for example going from 10,000 to products to 100,000?”

It must be pointed out that the question is about a site growing ten times larger.

This is is Mueller’s answer:

“I don’t think you have to look for exotic explanations. If you grow a website significantly, in this case, by a factor of 10, then your website will overall be very different. By definition, the old website would only be 10% of the new website. This means it’s only logical to expect search engines to re-evaluate how they show your website. It’s basically a new website after all.

It’s good to be strategic about changes like this, I wouldn’t look at it as being primarily an SEO problem.”

Re-Evaluate How Google Shows A Website

Mueller said it’s not primarily an SEO problem but it’s possible most SEOs would disagree because anything that affects how a search engine shows a site is an SEO problem. Maybe Mueller meant that it should be seen as a strategic problem?

Regardless, John Mueller’s answer means that growing a site exponentially in a short amount of time could cause Google to re-evaluate a site because it’s essentially an an entirely new website, which might be an undesirable scenario.

Although Mueller didn’t specify how long a re-evaluation can take, he has indicated in the past that it can take months. Maybe things have changed but this is what he said four years ago about how long a sitewide evaluation takes:

“It takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the Internet.

…And that’s something that can easily take, I don’t know, a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year, for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality.”

The implication of a sitewide evaluation triggered by an exponential growth in content is that the optimized way to approach content growth is to do it in phases. It’s something to consider.