: How does Google determine when a website has been radically improved? Say I have a website which is really terrible, and Google is aware of this. If I change everything about it and turn it

@Gretchen104

Google is aware of changes you make on your site the same way they were aware of "terribleness" and other problems: they are constantly spidering your site (most commonly via inbound links) and parsing the content according to their algorithms. The results are a rank/weight of your content on a site and page-by-page basis and that's how Google determines where your site appears in its search results.

So as you publish your changes to the live web server, Google will see them and begin to integrate them into its calculations. However, this is not an immediate thing. It can take Google weeks or even months to figure out what changed and recalculate things.

But some of this depends on exactly why Google thinks your site is terrible. If it is simply poor design choices, fixing those and re-publishing is typically all you need to do. If your site is being actively penalized by Google because of some bad behavior on your part (intentional or otherwise) you have to make sure you fix the bad behavior (remove/disavow spammy backlinks, remove spammy content, etc). Once the bad behavior is fixed you will want to go to Google Webmaster Tools (you are using GWT, right?) and submit your site for a manual reconsideration request. This will trigger a review by a Google employee to make sure you truly have removed all of the problems. This can take quite a long time to accomplish and even longer for the recalculation even if your penalties are removed.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Sarah324

They find out the same way they found out about any new great content: links. If your content is new and improved it should acquire new links, higher quality links, and more of them. That is a positive ranking factor for Google.

As for "negative history" that depends. If your content was bad but not low quality as per Google's standards (a.k.a. you didn't fall victim to Panda or Penguin), it won't matter at all. But if you did I would only consider it possible to haunt you later if your site once again becomes low quality. In that case I can see it being possible that your site may find it more difficult to recover from it a second time. But that's just a guess as I am unaware of any official Google news concerning this area of SEO.

Vote Up Vote Down