Google’s John Mueller was recently presented with a question from a website owner, curious as to what could be done to trigger a full site wide quality re-evaluation.
Along with clarifying whether or not it is possible to trigger a re-evaluation, Mueller also went into a little detail regarding the purpose of re-evaluations and when they may be needed.
The question from the website owner read as follows:
“What are some things that a webmaster or SEO firm can do to trigger a site-wide re-evaluation from a quality point of view.
Like when you change domains or when does Google say, okay… let’s try to collect new signals and see whether the site is better from a quality point of view.”
Mueller made it clear that there is not really anything a website owner can do on their end to trigger a site wide re-evaluation, nor should doing so be necessary; given the way in which all site changes are read and updated in Google’s index almost as soon as they are made.
Here’s how Mueller presented his answer:
“I don’t think there is anything technical that you can do to… trigger a re-evaluation.
And usually that’s also not necessary because essentially our systems re-evaluate all the time.
They look at the content that we found for a site and over time as we see that change we will take that into account.
So that’s not something where you kind of have to do something manually to trigger that.”
Scenarios Where a Quality Re-evaluation Could Be Necessary
Offering further insights, Mueller went into a little more detail regarding when and where it could be necessary for a re-evaluation to be carried out:
“The one time where we do have to kind of reconsider how the site works is if the site does a serious restructuring of its website where it changes a lot of the URLs and all of the internal links change, where maybe you move from one CMS to another CMS and everything changes and looks different.
Then from a quality point of view or from a technical point of view, we can’t just keep the old understanding of the site, of the pages, because everything is different now.
So we kind of have to rethink all of that.
But that’s also not something that is triggered by anything specific but rather it’s just well lots of things have changed on the site and even to kind of incrementally keep up we have to do a lot of incremental changes to re-evaluate that.”
In summary the answer to is nothing, there is nothing that can be done on the part of the webmaster to trigger a site wide quality re-evaluation, though Google remains adamant that doing so would almost never be necessary.
Unless a website is effectively rebuilt from the ground up, any and all changes made incrementally should be reflected in Google’s index automatically, negating the need for a full re-evaluation.