So I got to interview John on stage, and, as many of you may know, John is a webmaster relations guy at Google and really a point of contact for many of us in the industry when there are technical questions or questions about how Google is treating different things. If you followed some of the stuff that I've written and talked about in the past, you'll know that I've always been a little bit suspicious of some of the official lines that come out of Google and felt like either we don't get the full story or we haven't been able to drill in deep enough and really figure out what's going on. I felt like that had got a bit confusing, because our suspicion is that there is some kind of an authority or a trust metric that Google has and holds at a domain level. So yes, John confirmed that until they have some of those metrics developed, when they've seen a bit of content for long enough, and it can have its own link metrics and usage metrics, in the intervening time up until that point it can inherit some of this stuff from the domain. So he said, yes, Google has also seen these things. The way he explained it connects back into this Domain Authority thing in my mind, which is to say that the way they think about it is: Are these pages on this subdomain part of the same website as things on the main domain? If it is currently on a subdomain, then it's a little trickier to make that case. If it's treated as part of the site, a subdomain is equivalent to a subfolder But unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, I couldn't tie John down to any particular way of telling if this is the case. This was one of the things that I was kind of trying to push to John a little more was kind of saying, "More of this, please. He's just going around the organization, finding individual Google engineers to answer these questions.
When you’ve got one of Google’s most helpful and empathetic voices willing to answer your most pressing SEO questions, what do you ask? Will Critchlow recently had the honor of interviewing Google’s John Mueller at SearchLove London, and in this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday he shares his best lessons from that session, covering the concept of Domain Authority, the great subdomain versus subfolder debate, and a view into the technical workings of noindex/nofollow.
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Video Transcription
Hi, Whiteboard Friday fans. I’m Will Critchlow from Distilled, and I found myself in Seattle, wanted to record another Whiteboard Friday video and talk through some things that I learned recently when I got to sit down with John Mueller from Google at our SearchLove London conference recently.
So I got to interview John on stage, and, as many of you may know, John is a webmaster relations guy at Google and really a point of contact for many of us in the industry when there are technical questions or questions about how Google is treating different things. If you followed some of the stuff that I’ve written and talked about in the past, you’ll know that I’ve always been a little bit suspicious of some of the official lines that come out of Google and felt like either we don’t get the full story or we haven’t been able to drill in deep enough and really figure out what’s going on.
I was under no illusions that I might be able to completely fix this this in one go, but I did want to grill John on a couple of specific things where I felt like we hadn’t maybe asked things clearly enough or got the full story. Today I wanted to run through a few things that I learned when John and I sat down together. A little side note, I found it really fascinating doing this kind of interview. I sat on stage in a kind of journalistic setting. I had never done this before. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up Whiteboard Friday one day on things I learned and how to run interviews.
1. Does Google have a “Domain Authority” concept?
But the first thing that I wanted to quiz John about was this domain authority idea. So here we are on Moz. Moz has a proprietary metric called domain authority, DA. I feel like when, as an industry, we’ve asked Google, and John in particular, about this kind of thing in the past, does Google have a concept of domain authority, it’s got bundled up with feeling like, oh, he’s had an easy way out of being able to answer and say, “No, no, that’s a proprietary Moz metric. We don’t have that.”
I felt like that had got a bit confusing, because our suspicion is that there is some kind of an authority or a trust metric that Google has and holds at a domain level. We think that’s true, but we felt like they had always been able to wriggle out of answering the question. So I said to John, “Okay, I am not asking you do you use Moz’s domain authority metric in your ranking factors. Like we know that isn’t the case. But do you have something a little bit like it?”
Yes, Google has metrics that map into similar things
John said yes. He said yes, they have metrics that, his exact quote was, “map into similar things.”My way of phrasing this was this is stuff that is at the domain level. It’s based on things like link authority, and it is something that is used to understand performance or to rank content across an entire domain. John said yes, they have something similar to that.
New content inherits those metrics
They use it in particular when they discover new content on an existing domain. New content, in some sense, can inherit some of the authority from the domain, and this is part of the reason why we figured they must have something like this, because we’ve seen identical content perform differently on different sites. We know that there’s something to this. So yes, John confirmed that until they have some of those metrics developed, when they’ve seen a bit of content for long enough, and it can have its own link metrics and usage metrics, in the intervening time up until that point it can inherit some of this stuff from the domain.
Not wholly link-based
He did also just confirm that it’s not just link-based. This is not just a domain-level PageRank type thing.
2. Subdomains versus subfolders
This led me into the second thing that I really wanted to get out of him, which was — and when I raised this, I got kind of an eye roll, “Are we…
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