In a recent interview, John Mueller from Google explained how site quality can affect your search rankings and whether or not Google shows rich results from a site. He answered a series of questions about a site that has lost its rich results display and explained the reason why it was taken away by Google and whether or not it will ever return in the future.
Rich Results Removed After Site Redesign
Redesigning your website can impact your website in several ways. There is a chance you may lose your ranking and slip down a few spots but it doesn’t mean you can not make a recovery. There are more than a few anecdotal reports of site designs that go bad, turn out neutral or work out great, it doesn’t necessarily have to change your ranking. However, many websites have reported having lost their rich results with the site redesign. These websites also checked their schema markup to check if there were technical issues but no problem was found as the markup passed all the tests. In a situation like this, website owners are often left wondering because they can’t fix what they are not aware of.
Google’s John Mueller Discussing Rich Results
While answering the question, John Mueller suggested at one point that there is a high possibility that the site is not responsible for the loss of rich results. However, he has also discussed re-evaluating the website for quality.
Site Quality Can Affect Rich Results Eligibility
This information gives us quite an insightful view into the connection of re-designing with the re-evaluation of site quality evaluated by edkentmedia.com. This is something that fewer people are aware of and can prove to be highly useful when it comes to diagnosing why the rich results stopped showing.
John Mueller Hack for Rich Results
He also suggested that website owners must check if the rich results are taken away by Google because of a technical issue or because Google was not sure about the quality of your website. Mueller continued: “So one way to kind of double-check that is if you do a site query for these individual pages, do the rich results show up there or not? If they do show up there then that means technically we can recognize them but we don’t want to show them. So that’s kind of a hint that maybe from a quality point of view you need to improve things. If they don’t show up with a site query then that means more that there’s still something technical which is broken with regards to that.”
No Fixed Delay After a Redesign
John Mueller has also mentioned that after a redesign, if there are not any major changes to its design, and everything otherwise stays the same, then Google will generally crawl it like usual and website owners should not expect any disruption. As the previous website will now be gradually replaced by Google’s index by a new site. Mueller finished his answer by saying, “So it’s not that there is a fixed delay, after the restructuring of a website, for us to start showing them again. It’s more like… maybe there was coincidentally weird timing or maybe there’s a technical issue.” However, regarding the site query, Mueller also warned that it is not absolutely reliable. He said, “Yeah, it’s not 100% perfect. But it works for a lot of these cases when it comes to rich results.”
The Site Query Hack
The site query does not use the regular ranking algorithm by Google. It is still unknown what it uses but one thing is for sure that it is different from the regular search query. In this Q & A seminar, Google’s John Mueller has given his insightful advice on how website owners can find a way to know what’s wrong with a website. The important takeaway from this blog is that site quality has a lot to do with your Google search rankings and it may also be the reason why your rich results are taken away by Google.
