Generally SEOs tend to believe that Google determines the quality of a site based on all the pages on the site, not just portions of those pages. So if you have a very low quality section on your site, it can hurt the rest of your site. Google has even said this. But maybe that is no longer black and white?
Mihai Aperghis, an SEO, and John Mueller, a Googler, had this conversation in this past Friday's Google SEO hangout starting at about the 51:14 mark. I am not going to transcribe the whole thing but summarize and quote pieces.
The first part was about how long does a site need to wait for Google to process a quality change and the answer was at least two months - one month won't cut it. And this applies to both Google Search and Google Discover, it isn't different. John said he would guess for a large site a couple of months would give Google a chance to understand it better. A month is too little to see a significant impact. John explains it is not "particular to Google Discover itself" but more on how Google understands websites.
At 53:33 John then goes into explaining that for a site that produces a lot of new content often, then Google will "focus essentially on the newer content on the main category sections of the web site." Because of the structure of your site, you are giving your newer content more prominence on your web site and Google will focus its crawling and indexing more on that newer content. John said if you are constantly creating new content, then that is where Google will shift its focus on.
Mihai asked if the older content can pull down the site in Google search and John said it depends on the site. John said if you have two parts of your site, a news section and a reference section, and both are important, Google will balance the two. But if you just have news, Google will just focus on the news part.
Then at 55:31 John answered saying "I mean it kind of depends on what kind of things you're focusing on. So if you're looking at an overall quality issue with regards to your website and you have kind of this reference part that's really important for your website but it's really low quality then we will still balance that low quality part with your newer quality news content and try to find some some middle ground there with regards to how we understand the quality of your website overall." "But it really kind of depends on on your website and it's not so trivial to just say oh we will take a look at all the Search Console traffic and impressions kind of thing. It's like we we try to figure out what what is important for the site overall," he added.
I think, this might be related to an indexing thing. John has said that Google only judges sites based on what it indexes of that site. And if Google is not indexing big portions of your site, it won't judge those portions. Get it? So if Google is focused on indexing newer content, based on how you structure your web site then Google might not be indexing that low quality content from ages ago anymore. That older lower quality content won't be ranking in Google but at the same time, it won't be dragging down your site's quality. Again, "it depends" on your site and specific situation for your web site.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Glenn Gabe and I were discussing this over the weekend and he shared his thoughts a bit before I posted this, here are his thoughts:
@johnmu went on to explain that Google will focus on content based on your site. E.g. if you are news site publishing content all the time, then G will focus on that newer content for indexing. And if you have multiple sections, then Google needs to balance those quality-wise... pic.twitter.com/iFPFHVKruN
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 21, 2020
And remember, Discover's documentation explains that Google wants to surface content from sites that have *many individual pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T)*. So IMO, be careful if you have lower-quality content indexed. pic.twitter.com/Kb90PLeqNb
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 21, 2020
