Google has raised the bar: now it's quality over quantity

In this article, I look at how Google's indexing behaviour has changed and why quality is now more important than quantity. Because as someone who has worked in SEO for many years, I have observed a change in Google's behaviour.
What has happened is that AI and new algorithms have increased the demands on content. And there is a risk that low-quality pages can negatively affect the visibility of the whole domain.

Blog

Lars Nordengren
Senior SEO & AI Strategist

This has happened

Google is always looking to become more efficient and stay relevant.

The big change happened back in October 2023, and it's actually quite logical when you think about it. Google has realised that there are too many websites that just feed their pages full of text content just to rank in search results. Because as more people realise that AI can produce lots of long texts in no time, Google has been trying to find ways to ensure that the content is actually relevant and comes from credible sources.

That's why Google has started to treat domains in a new way over the past year. Previously, they indexed everything and prioritised the best content. Now, a domain has to prove its value before Google even starts looking for the "gold".

What's important to realise is that this change affects entire websites, not just individual pages. A website with too many low-quality pages risks having significantly less visibility in search results, or in the worst case - none at all.

That's why we at seodr. have started to advise our clients to think about every new page they want to publish - does it really add value?

Understanding Google's indexing trends
There are currently two major trends affecting how Google indexes content. Firstly, the open web has become smaller, which means that Google now has to crawl large platforms like YouTube, Reddit and TikTok to find new content. Many of these platforms use complex JavaScript, making it harder for Google to find and index content.

Second, AI fills the web with mediocre and poor content. Having more pages isn't always bad, but many of them don't meet Google's quality requirements. This means that SEO specialists need to be careful; if they add too many pages without thinking about quality, the whole domain can suffer.

Therefore, we need to rethink quality and what it means and set up systems to monitor domain quality at page level.
This is why this happens
- Google wants to save resources and become more efficient.
- If a domain frequently produces poor content, it won't get another chance to negatively impact Google's index.
- Partial indexing is a smart way to deal with low quality content. Instead of indexing everything and then trying to rank pages, it lets Google look at the overall quality of a domain.
- Quality requirements have increased because there is so much more content on the web, and Google wants to optimise its index for AI Overview, which is the name of Google's AI service. All other AI services say Search Generative Experience.
This means we need to change the way we monitor our website and focus on quality. A good rule of thumb is: If you can't bring something new or better to the web, it's probably not good enough.
Domain quality
Domain quality is about how many of the indexed pages meet Google's quality standards. Only indexed pages are counted, and it is unclear how many "bad" pages can exist before Google reduces traffic to a domain. I define domain quality based on three areas:
- User experience: Are users finding what they are looking for?
- Content quality: How valuable and well-designed is the content?
- Technical status: Is there duplicate content? How is the page rendering and context?
Bigger websites, bigger problems
Domain quality can be more of a challenge for larger sites, but even sites with smaller pages can be affected. Adding new pages is not a bad thing, but you need to be careful. For example, it can be valuable to publish innovative content that does not directly target a specific keyword. This is why it is important to measure engagement and user satisfaction.

Keep an eye on quality

The most important way to keep low-quality sites away and reduce the risk of being affected is to have the right monitoring system. After all, it's hard to improve what you don't measure. A good system tracks metrics for each page and compares them to the average. If I could only choose three metrics, I would watch:

Rejection rate
Conversions (both soft and hard)
Clicks and ranking by page type

Ideally, your system should warn you if there is an increase in crawl rate, especially for new pages.

Executive summary

Google now focuses more on domain quality and only indexes pages that fulfil high quality requirements. Too much low-quality content can lead to fewer pages being indexed, or in the worst case, none at all. To succeed, we need to have systems in place to ensure that all content adds value.

The adage "quality over quantity" has never been more relevant in SEO than it is now. And that's actually good news for anyone invested in creating genuine, valuable content.

You are always welcome to contact seodr to discuss how we can help you!

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