Google said it can recognize and understand if a site is reputable about a specific topic area. John said it does make sense for sites to really hone in on their subject matter expertise because what “you’re essentially doing is on the one hand for search engines you’re kind of building out your reputation of knowledge on that specific topic area.”

In addition to this, John Mueller said that this can help the site also surface in the Google search results “for the broader topic” as well.

This seems to show Google does have a way to understand the site as a whole, on the site level, not just on a URL by URL basis.

This came up at the 34:20 mark in Friday’s video where the question was:

John said it is “always useful” to do this because “because what you’re essentially doing is on the one hand for search engines you’re kind of building out your reputation of knowledge on that specific topic area. And for users as well it provides a little bit more context on kind of like why they should trust you.”

He goes on:

Glenn Gabe summed it up nicely in these tweets:

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at Twitter.