🔥 The site geeksforgeeks[.org] was recently deindexed from Google. You can see the dramatic fall of visibility from Ahrefs (screenshot #1)
🤔 However, looking at AlsoAsked data, I can see the domain is still currently visible today in hundreds of PAA boxes (screenshot #2) - maybe not what you would expect!
Some things we know:
1/ "Feature generation" - i.e. making things like People Also Ask boxes and Featured Snippets happens in post-ranking stage.
2/ We know certain metrics site as "site quality" are passed to Google's front end to qualify sites for these features.
3/ A site quality score <0.4 means you are not eligible for featured snippets.
Knowing these things we can narrow our understanding of how Google is working to these options:
1/ Site quality scores may take time to update (much like how a PageRank score might update), so it might take days/weeks to see the site drop from PAAs. So it may be the case as this happens (the click data for those terms disappear), the site naturally drops out of searches.
2/ The nature of the penalty may suggestion that rather than setting certain scores to zero, there is an additional flag that has been added to the site to remove/supress it from search, which keeps other metrics in tact. This would also make it easier to reinstate a site after other corrective action was taken.
3/ There is some disconnect between the "backend" systems that are responsible for rankings and the "front end" systems such as the Twiddler framework which work in isolation to do re-ranking.
All interesting - would love to hear any other theories, and big thank you to the super smart Trevor Stolber who discussed this with me while I was on holiday at the weeked and gave my brain something to stew on! 🍲
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