Google’s John Mueller recently responded on Bluesky to a complaint about indexing and ranking problems in Google Search. He pointed out that a possible cause is the site having a lot of unrelated content.
John said, “One of the things I noticed is that there’s a lot of totally unrelated content on the site.” He then asked the site owner, “Is that by design?”—suggesting this off-topic content might be part of their plan or a mistake.
We’ve covered this topic before; some call it “staying in your lane”—meaning websites should focus only on their main subject and avoid posting unrelated material.
John also gave tips on how to spot such content. He recommended using Bing searches like:
- site:tpointtech.com watch online
- site:tpointtech.com sexy
- site:tpointtech.com top 10
He said that similar odd results will probably show up in Google Search Console too.
Here’s his post on Bluesky—click through to read the full conversation.
To be fair, Google has said in the past that running a niche website isn’t required to rank well in search. You don’t have to stick to just one narrow topic to appear in search results.
However, as John Mueller pointed out, if your site mainly focuses on search engines and you suddenly start posting about unrelated topics like recipes, it might confuse both your readers and search engines.
There’s an ongoing discussion about this on Bluesky if you want to follow along.
