Google Makes It Clear It Has Both Site Wide & Page Level Ranking Signals

[Cpvr]

Google has updated its guide to Google Search ranking systems to mention at the top of the page that it uses both page-level and site-wide signals for search rankings. There was a debate on this after the Google creator summit about Google possibly saying they only have page level signals, so this may clear things up a bit.

The paragraph at the top reads:

Our ranking systems are designed to work on the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand how to rank individual pages. Site-wide signals and classifiers are also used and contribute to our understanding of pages. Having some good site-wide signals does not mean that all content from a site will always rank highly, just as having some poor site-wide signals does not mean all the content from a site will rank poorly.

Google also noted here that they made this change to "make it easier for those interested to understand through our documentation that we have both page-level and site-wide signals used in ranking."

This comes after Glenn Gabe's monster of a post showing how Google has said they had site wide signals for years. This also proves that Google still does use site wide signals.

Of course, as Glenn noted in his post, we covered this topic countless times.

Here is the updated content:



As Glenn wrote on X yesterday, "And regarding site-wide signals, Google updated its "Guide to search ranking systems" page to include a paragraph right up top about using site-wide signals and classifiers. I'll be adding this to my post obviously... and it should be put to rest any idea that only page-level signals are used."

source: Google Makes It Clear On Site Wide & Page Level Ranking Signals

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I see many people doing SEO for their homepage but not so much for all the other pages within it.

However, my core content (blogging-wise) isn't on the homepage. It's linked to it, but it's not covered in length on it.

We shouldn't always consider the homepage the most important and valuable page in the ecosystem of our websites.

 

[JoelR]

We shouldn't always consider the homepage the most important and valuable page in the ecosystem of our websites.

No, we shouldn't!

Every public page in our community is potentially a front-door. In my main community, my homepage is maybe the fourth or fifth most popular page.

The homepage is actually more for people searching directly for the brand or returning users. It's not for true guests, which are referred via search engines.