Google's New Indexing Policy: Unmet Classifiers Lead to Content Devaluation

Google uses various classifiers to determine whether content should be indexed. These include:

• Domain history & perceived trustworthiness: Content from trusted, established domains is less likely to be de-indexed.
• Brand signals: This includes branded search behavior, social signals, citations, and link history.
• Trust classifiers: These are likely related to the overall reputation and reliability of the content and its source.

Content that does not meet these classifiers may be dropped straight from the index.

Content performance over time is crucial for Google indexing. Factors that Google considers include:

• How well content has performed historically on the website.
• Whether the domain has maintained its rankings despite previous updates.
• The effort to keep content up-to-date, beyond just changing dates.

A consistent and positive content performance profile, with sustained, lost, or recovered URLs, also plays a role in the indexing process.

User behavior has a significant impact on content performance in Google SERPs. Google may use shifting SERPs and behavioral data across site profiles to build a larger dataset for High Confidence Updates (HCU) and Machine Learning (ML). Sites that demonstrate behavior indicative of a good user experience and helpful content tend to perform better. Factors include:

• User engagement: Including pogo-sticking and engagement signals.
• Session data: Aggregated data at the query level, repeat searches, and whether these indicate unmet user needs.
• Post-pogo interaction behaviors: Engagement time, session termination, and adjusted searches.

High-quality content may be wiped out from Google SERPs due to the implementation of High Confidence Updates (HCU). The author believes that once the HCU process starts, it acts like a steamroller and becomes less selective, leading to the de-indexing of pages. This is observed when auditing various sites, where pages that lose clicks are subsequently dropped from the index, indicating that they have been negatively affected by HCU.