SEO success, you would have seen someone make it public by now. 'Many different signals' contribute to rankings Despite the fact that there is no silver bullet to achieving high rankings, SEO professionals often look for quick fixes and easy fixes when a site's rankings take a hit. During a recent hangout about central webmaster office hours, a participant asked Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller to improve his site's content to reverse a drop in traffic he believed was the result of the Panda May 2014 update.
The webmaster told Mueller that he and his team were going through the site category by category to improve the content; he wanted to know if the rankings would also improve category by category, or if there was an overall score applied to the entire jewelry retouching service site. Here's what Mueller said in response (emphasis mine): “For the most part, we've moved more and more towards understanding the sections of the site better and understanding the quality of those sections. So if you…walk through your site step by step, then I would expect to see…a gradual change in the way we view your site.
But, I also assume that if... you've had a low quality site since 2014, that's a long time to... maintain a low quality site, and that's something where I suspect there's a lot different signals that ... tell us that this is probably not such a good site. (Note: Hat tip to Glenn Gabe for surfacing.) I want to draw your attention to the bold part of the comment above. Doesn't that make you wonder what the "many different signals are?" While it's important not to over-analyze every Googler statement, it certainly seems like the