Google’s John Mueller was asked a two part question on the last video hangout he conducted. The first was, does it still take several months for Google to reevaluate the quality of a site. The second is, how do you know that you are on the right path to doing well after the next core update.

This question came up 6:15 mark into the video and John basically said:

(1) The time frame is still accurate but some sites might see improvements in a couple months, some might see improvements in 6 months and some might take longer. John said it can take a “couple of months, half a year, maybe even a bit longer.”

(2) In regards to part two, he said “that’s super hard” to know if you are on the right track to seeing a recovery. He said you will likely see a “drop in traffic from those pages” that you remove for quality reasons, because you are removing the pages. John added it might make sense for you to make “proxy metrics” where you can pretend to know how Google measures quality. Some of those metrics might be engagement metrics like time on site, conversions, etc. Not that Google uses these metrics in search, John said “it’s not so much that we would use that user behavior directly in search,” but these are “leading indicator for you to let you know that you’re on the right track.”

And you really can’t do this for a subset of your site, you need to go all in with these changes, John added. “From a kind of a Google search quality point of view, I don’t think taking a small subset of a site and improving the quality of that would be enough to to make us say oh this is a different part of a site and this is high quality and this is kind of medium quality, I will treat it differently,” John said.

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript of John’s answers (but watch how well the questions were phrases and asked):

Here is how Glenn Gabe, who deserves the hat tip on this, summed it up on Twitter:

Forum discussion at Twitter.