John Mueller of Google confirmed on Friday's webmaster hangout video that Google does and can use historic or legacy data about your web site for ranking purposes. He gave a few examples of how Google uses it; your links over time, the adult SafeSearch filter and some of Google's quality algorithms.
The question came up at 21:25 minute mark. Let's jump to the quality algorithms part, where John said "similarly with some of the quality algorithms it can also take a bit of time to kind of adjust from one state to another state. So if you significantly improve your website then it's not that from one crawl to the next crawl we will say oh this is a fantastic website now. It's something we're probably over the course of a year maybe sometimes even longer our algorithms have to learn that actually this is a much better website than we thought initially. And we can treat that a little bit better in the search results over time."
So yes, if you do stuff where Google loses trust in your site and the quality algorithms are involved, it can take a year or more for Google to trust your site again.
Here is what John said in terms of how a site earns links over the years. "So in particular if you have a website that has existed for a very long period of time then that's something where the whole ecosystem around the website will will have evolved around around that. Snd there'll be links from all over the web for a longer period of time and when we look at that website we will see kind of the the current snapshot of the website what we recently crawled but all of these signals that have been collected over the years."
Of course, the adult SafeSearch filter takes time as well.
Here is the video embed:
Here is the transcript:
Does Google ever use historic data when deciding how to rank a site or do the algorithms only look at the present and most recent snapshot. I mean can a website build up goodwill over a period of time which may help it?Yes. In some ways that that can happen.
So in particular if you have a website that has existed for a very long period of time then that's something where the whole ecosystem around the website will will have evolved around around that. Snd there'll be links from all over the web for a longer period of time and when we look at that website we will see kind of the the current snapshot of the website what we recently crawled but all of these signals that have been collected over the years.
So that's something that can definitely play a role.
There are also signals within search specific to a website that be collected over time.
The ones that I've I've run into a few times are generally around adult content. So that's something where if if a website for a longer period of time provided adult content then our algorithms might might start learning that actually we need to filter this using should safe search. Snd if that website were to completely revamp the the whole website and who is suddenly I don't know non adult website and then it can happen that for a period of time those safe search algorithms will try to stay on the safer side and might still filter that site in Safe Search for a while. So that's something that can sometimes take a bit of time to settle down.
Similarly with some of the quality algorithms it can also take a bit of time to kind of adjust from one state to another state. So if you significantly improve your website then it's not that from one crawl to the next crawl we will say oh this is a fantastic website now. It's something we're probably over the course of a year maybe sometimes even longer our algorithms have to learn that actually this is a much better website than we thought initially. And we can treat that a little bit better in the search results over time.
So that's something where essentially the historic data that you mentioned there is is not historic in the sense that it's like 10 years old data. But it's more that sometimes the status of things maybe a year or even two years ago can still play into how a website is ranked in search now.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
