Google’s John Mueller said it is a big deal if your most important page or pages are terrible but not such a big deal if your less important pages are terrible. So if your home page is terrible, that is really not good. But if your archived orphaned pages are not good, that is not such a big deal for Google SEO or ranking purposes.

John said on Mastodon “if a site’s most important page (say homepage) is “terrible” (in the sense of any algorithm), that’s a pretty big deal. If the same site has a random archived page that’s “terrible,” no big deal.”

The question was from Robb Watts, and his question didn’t exactly ask this; it was more about the percentage of bad pages, but here is what he said:

John responded:

John later added again, “It’s really not a matter of number of pages or percentage of pages on a site, since those are such arbitrary metrics. It’s really more about the bigger picture for the site.”

So yea, if the best stuff on your site is really, really bad, then that is a non-starter.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.