Why is your SEO agency not effective? | 4 signals to pay attention to

Indexed Page Growth Stagnation

Log in to Google Search Console (GSC) and check the “Index” report.

If you published 50 high-quality articles during the quarter but “Valid Index” pages only increased by 1-2 pages, there is a serious technical SEO bottleneck.

No Impressions Growth

Check the data from the past 3-6 months on GSC’s “Performance” page.

If total impressions remain consistently at (for example) 5,000 times/month with no upward trend, the keyword strategy is not reaching new audiences.

Rankings Not Improving

Use Semrush or Ahrefs to track core commercial keywords.

If 60% of target keywords remain outside the top 50 for six consecutive months, or fail to reach the first page, it indicates a lack of backlink building or page optimization.

Content Doesn’t Meet E-E-A-T

Check content quality.

If articles lack author credentials, have outdated perspectives, or simply stuff keywords, resulting in average time on page below 30 seconds, the content lacks expertise and authority and will be downranked by algorithms.

Your Indexed Page Count Isn’t Growing

If you’re paying several thousand dollars per month in service fees, yet the number of “Indexed” pages in Google Search Console (GSC) remains a flat line over 90 days, this is abnormal.

In a healthy SEO project, an agency should produce at least 4-8 high-quality new pages (such as blogs or landing pages) per month.

If quarterly index growth rate is below 10%, it typically means the agency isn’t actually producing content, or there are serious technical errors like robots.txt blocking and sitemap submission failures.

Without new pages entering Google’s database, it’s impossible to cover more long-tail keywords, and traffic naturally won’t increase.

Content Output Volume

According to Ahrefs’ billion-page research data, only 5.7% of pages can enter Google’s top 10 search results within one year of publication.

If an agency only publishes 1-2 blog posts for you per month, at this probability, you may need to wait several years to see significant traffic growth.

Most underperforming agencies spend a lot of time adjusting existing pages’ Meta Descriptions or H1 tags, avoiding the most time-consuming but effective work—creating new URLs.

Google’s algorithm increasingly rewards sites that provide comprehensive coverage in specific fields.

Assuming you run a company selling “SaaS accounting software,” if your site only has pages about “accounting software pricing” and “feature introductions,” Google will have difficulty confirming you’re an expert in this field.

Conversely, if the agency builds a content cluster of 50 pages for you covering peripheral topics like “tax deductions for small businesses,” “payroll automation processes,” “invoicing best practices,” and “2024 tax compliance guides,” Google’s semantic analysis (NLP) can identify that your site’s knowledge graph under the “accounting” entity is complete.

Capturing long-tail keywords depends entirely on generating new pages.

Although individual long-tail keywords drive small traffic, they have extremely high conversion intent and very low Keyword Difficulty (KD).

If your agency only targets high KD (80+) keywords like “CRM Software” without creating hundreds of pages targeting specific long-tail needs like “CRM for dental clinics” or “real estate CRM with SMS functionality,” you’re missing the biggest chunk of search traffic.

Every uncreated and unindexed page is an abandonment of long-tail traffic.

“Crawled – Currently Not Indexed”

In Google Search Console’s “Pages” report, the status “Crawled – currently not indexed” is fundamentally different from “Discovered – currently not indexed.”

The latter means Google just knows the page exists but hasn’t had time to look at it, while “Crawled – not indexed” means Googlebot has spent its budget, downloaded the page HTML, rendered and analyzed it, then made a clear decision:

This page doesn’t have sufficient value to enter Google’s index.

If your agency reports publishing 20 new articles monthly, but 15 of them remain in this status long-term, it indicates the content produced is considered redundant or spam by Google.

The most common cause is agencies adopting low-cost “batch production” strategies, especially using large language models (LLM) to generate unoriginal, generic content.

Google’s “Helpful Content System” and related algorithms aim to reward content with unique insights, original data, or personal experience.

For example, if the agency writes an article about “how to choose a CRM” that only lists five generic steps, while millions of similar articles already exist on the internet, Google’s de-duplication mechanism will identify that the page lacks indexing value.

Beyond thin content itself, this status often points to the agency’s use of “doorway pages” in site structure.

This is an outdated black-hat or gray-hat tactic where agencies create numerous pages targeting specific long-tail words or geographic locations, with different URLs and titles (e.g., “New York SEO services,” “Boston SEO services”), but the page body text is nearly identical, just with city names replaced.

Google strongly dislikes this attempt to manipulate rankings and will refuse to index these highly duplicate pages.

If you check the URL patterns of these non-indexed pages in GSC and find they mostly follow a specific templated structure, this is usually evidence of the agency trying to pass KPIs through low-quality page bombing.

Severe internal keyword cannibalization can also cause this problem.

If newly published pages are too similar in content to existing high-authority pages on the site, Google will choose to keep the old pages and discard the new ones.

If agencies blindly publish new content without conducting a content audit, this often causes such waste—new pages get crawled and then discarded.

If you find many pages in this status in GSC reports, this usually boils down to several specific low-quality content types, all traces of the agency taking shortcuts:

• Thin Content Pages: The page body has minimal content, text may be less than 300 words, and most of the space is taken up by navigation bars, footers, ads, or large header images, lacking substantial information.
• Soft 404 Pages: The page returns a 200 OK status code but displays “Product not found” or “Search results empty.” This is common with agency-generated invalid category pages or tag pages.
• Aggregated Content: Page content is entirely auto-scraped and assembled from other sites’ RSS feeds, social media feeds, or product descriptions, with no original value-added content.
• Orphan Pages: The agency published the page but didn’t add internal links in site navigation, blog lists, or related articles. Although submitted to Google via sitemap, due to lack of internal link authority passing, Google judges it as extremely low importance and refuses to index it.

Google has a certain crawl budget for each site.

If crawlers frequently visit and analyze low-quality pages, only to ultimately decide not to index them, this not only wastes server resources but also lowers Google’s overall quality rating for the site.

Technical Blocks

The most common scenario occurs after website redesigns, migrations, or when new functional modules are launched.

Developers typically build new pages in a staging environment, and to prevent Google from crawling these unfinished pages, they follow standard procedures to add noindex tags.

When pushing code to production, the agency’s technical team often forgets to remove these tags.

Googlebot crawls the page, sees the noindex directive, and strictly follows the instruction to remove the page from the index.

This doesn’t just happen in HTML’s <head> area; what’s more hidden is the X-Robots-Tag: noindex sent via HTTP response headers.

This tag isn’t visible in page source code and must be discovered by checking network requests in developer tools.

Beyond noindex directives, robots.txt misconfiguration is also a common cause of index stagnation.

robots.txt is the first file search engines check when visiting a site, and it specifies which directories crawlers can access.

Sometimes, to prevent crawlers from accessing the website backend (like /admin/) or certain irrelevant parameter pages, agencies write Disallow rules.

Due to slightly improper regex (Regular Expression) writing, a single wrong wildcard can block an entire blog directory or even the entire site.

For example, if you meant to block /blog/tag/ but missed a character and blocked /blog/ instead, all newly published articles become invisible to Google.

In GSC’s “Coverage” report, such errors typically display as “Blocked by robots.txt.”

Unlike noindex, pages blocked by robots.txt Google won’t even download the content—regardless of how good the page content is or how much authority it has, if that door is closed, no optimization work can begin.

Another technical factor preventing index growth is the misuse of canonical tags.

In modern CMSs (like WordPress, Shopify, Magento), if SEO plugins aren’t configured correctly, the system may automatically generate incorrect canonical tags.

The most typical error is failed self-referential canonicalization, or incorrectly pointing all new pages’ canonical tags to the homepage or category pages.

For example, the agency publishes a new article about “cloud storage security” with URL /blog/cloud-storage-safety, but the page’s <link rel="canonical"> tag points to /blog/.

When Google sees this signal, it considers the new article just a duplicate of the blog listing page, so it chooses to only index the listing page and ignore the new article.

For more intuitive troubleshooting of these technical blocks, the table below lists common GSC status messages, technical root causes, and specific code characteristics:

GSC Status Message	Technical Root Cause	Code/Config Signature	Agency Mistake Point
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag	Page contains noindex directive	<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> or X-Robots-Tag: noindex in HTTP Header	Failed to remove test environment blocking tags when pushing to production.
Blocked by robots.txt	Crawler is denied access to that path	User-agent: * with Disallow: /folder-name/ rule covering new page paths	Rules written too broadly, accidentally blocking content directories that should be indexed.
Duplicate without user-selected canonical	Missing canonical tag causing duplicate detection	<link rel="canonical" ... /> missing from page source	CMS template configuration error, failing to auto-generate unique canonical links for new pages.
Duplicate, Google chose different canonical	Canonical tag pointing to wrong URL	<link rel="canonical" href="..."/> points to homepage or other non-page URL	Forgot to modify canonical link when copying page templates, causing old and new pages to “fight.”
Crawled – currently not indexed (Technical side)	Page rendering failed or content is empty	<div id="app"></div> (content empty) or status code returns non-200	JS rendering timeout, or server configuration error returning Soft 404.
Discovered – currently not indexed (Technical side)	Orphan pages or insufficient crawl budget	Page in sitemap but has no <a> tags pointing to it within the site	Forgot to add new page entry in menus, sidebars, or related articles.

If the agency’s newly developed pages rely entirely on client-side rendering without configuring server-side rendering (SSR) or dynamic rendering, Googlebot might only see a blank HTML shell when crawling—the actual content, links, and metadata all require browser JavaScript execution to display.

If script execution times out or errors occur, Google will consider this an empty page or soft 404 page, and naturally won’t index it.

Using GSC’s “URL Inspection” tool’s “View Crawled Page” function, you can clearly see what Google actually sees.

Impressions Aren’t Increasing

Impressions in Google Search Console (GSC) is the primary metric for measuring SEO progress, typically appearing 2 to 3 months before traffic growth.

In a healthy SEO project, within 45 to 60 days after publishing new pages, you should see a clear upward trend in impression data.

If the agency service has exceeded 90 days and your GSC total impressions curve remains flat, or non-branded impressions show no significant change, this indicates Google’s crawlers haven’t indexed new content, or the keywords the agency optimized have monthly search volume close to zero.

Wrong Keywords Selected

Many SEO agencies exploit clients’ unfamiliarity with technical metrics—they show numerous green upward arrows in monthly reports, claiming dozens or even hundreds of keywords have ranked on Google’s first page or even in the top 3.

However, when you check actual data in Google Search Console (GSC), you find impressions showing a诡异的 horizontal line with no growth.

Optimizing a keyword with zero monthly searches to the #1 position naturally generates zero organic traffic.

Only when a keyword itself has search demand (Search Volume) will ranking improvement translate into impressions growth. If the agency reports “ranked #1” but GSC shows only 1-2 impressions for that keyword in the past 28 days, that ranking has zero commercial value.

Agencies use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to specifically filter keywords with Keyword Difficulty (KD) below 5 or even 0.

A typical error case is over-specific long-tail keyword stuffing.

For example, a company selling CRM software should normally target “CRM for small business” with monthly search volume around 2,000 and high competition.

But to quickly deliver results, the agency might optimize “cloud-based crm software for freelance graphic designers in Nevada”—this extremely long keyword has zero competition, and the agency can rank it #1 on Google within two weeks by writing a 500-word page.

In monthly meetings, they’ll point to this ranking as an achievement, but this keyword might have fewer than 10 searches all year.

The disconnect between internal professional terminology and user search habits—the agency copies technical naming directly from the client’s product manual for optimization, without researching what users actually search for.

When users encounter problems, they usually search for symptoms or solutions, not specific product models or obscure industry definitions.

For example, users search “how to fix leaking roof,” but the agency optimizes “bituminous waterproofing membrane specification type B.”

Why Growth Is Necessary

In the initial stages of SEO strategy execution, the decoupling between clicks and impressions is a common and must be correctly interpreted phenomenon.

For a newly launched project or section just beginning optimization, when you publish new content or optimize existing pages, Googlebot first needs to crawl and index the pages, then the algorithm tests their relevance, and finally pushes them to higher ranking positions for clicks.

In the early ranking stage, pages typically appear between the 3rd and 8th pages of search results.

Pages in these positions can be recorded in impression data, but almost never generate clicks.

According to Advanced Web Ranking data, the top 3 positions on the first page of SERPs capture over 60% of click-through rate, while the second page and beyond drops to below 1%.

Therefore, during the first 3-4 months of optimization, clicks remaining flat is mathematically expected, but impressions must show an upward trend.

Impressions growth is the only physical evidence of ranking improvement and keyword coverage expansion.

If your agency claims to be performing comprehensive optimization work, but your Google Search Console (GSC) impressions curve remains flat over 90 days, this indicates Google is not conducting more frequent display tests for your site—the so-called optimization work hasn’t reached the algorithm layer.

Timeline	Impressions Status	Clicks Status	Average Position	Status Interpretation
Month 1	Slight fluctuation	Flat	> 50	Google begins recrawling and reindexing optimized pages, initially establishing keyword associations.
Month 2-3	Significant increase	Flat	20 – 40	Pages begin entering the top 5 pages. Keyword coverage increases, but ranking positions aren’t sufficient to generate traffic.
Month 4-5	Continuous growth	Slight increase	10 – 20	Some long-tail keywords enter the bottom of the first page or second page, beginning to generate occasional clicks.
Month 6+	High plateau	Significant growth	< 10	Core keywords enter the top 5 of the first page, impressions translate into substantial click traffic.

Impressions growth comes from expansion in two dimensions:

ranking improvement and keyword library expansion.

First, when a page moves from position 80 to position 20, although clicks remain zero, it’s more likely to appear within users’ field of vision during deep searches, thereby accumulating impression data.

Second, high-quality content optimization often involves semantic keyword layout.

A deep article about “SaaS Pricing Models” not only competes for the main keyword but naturally covers hundreds of long-tail variations like “B2B subscription strategies,” “freemium vs trial,” “SaaS billing best practices.”

If impressions aren’t growing, it means the agency’s content hasn’t triggered Google to index more semantic keywords, or the content depth is insufficient to cover any related search intents beyond the main keyword.

Another detail to watch is “rank transition” (test rankings).

Google often temporarily elevates new pages to higher ranking positions, giving them a small number of impression opportunities to collect user interaction data (such as CTR, dwell time), then decides their final ranking.

If your GSC chart shows no such fluctuation peaks, it indicates your site has too low authority or too poor content quality to even qualify for Google’s ranking tests.

For example, in finance or insurance industries, primary keywords are difficult to conquer, but specific-question long-tail Q&A content (such as “does travel insurance cover flight cancellation due to strike”) should begin accumulating impressions within 4-6 weeks of publication.

Rankings Aren’t Improving

Within 120 days of collaboration, if pages with KD (Keyword Difficulty) below 25 don’t appear in Google’s top 50, or if Google Search Console’s average position trend line has fluctuation rate below 5%, this is considered growth stagnation.

According to industry standards, high-quality SEO strategies should make 30% of pages show impressions growth of 150% or more within 6 months.

If rankings stagnate beyond page 8 (Position 80+) for more than two quarters, it typically indicates backlink Domain Rating (DR) growth hasn’t met standards, or the site’s LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) exceeds 2.5 seconds.

Search Intent Alignment

Google’s search algorithm has evolved to use BERT and MUM models to understand the deeper purpose of natural language. According to Ahrefs’ research on over 1 billion web pages, nearly 95% of newly published pages can’t rank in search results’ top 10 within a year, mainly because the page content’s solution doesn’t match users’ true expectations when searching.

When users input “Best CRM for startups” in Google, their search intent is to find a list containing comparisons, prices, and pros/cons, not a specific software’s official homepage.

If the agency still tries to compete for this keyword by optimizing homepage authority, no matter how many backlinks are invested, rankings typically stagnate beyond the 5th page, because the algorithm determines the page can’t satisfy “commercial investigation” type needs.

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Search Intent Classification	User-Expected Page Structure	Common Agency Mistakes	Recommended Metrics
Informational	In-depth guides, encyclopedia entries, long-form content with extensive data charts (usually >1800 words).	Writing short marketing soft articles lacking original research data or external authoritative citations.	Dwell time should exceed 3.5 minutes.
Navigational	Login pages, specific service introduction pages, brand contact information.	Forcibly inserting unrelated blog articles into brand keyword search results.	Brand keyword CTR should remain above 45%.
Commercial Investigation	“Top 10” lists, product comparison tables, aggregation pages with user reviews.	Only writing about their own product’s benefits without providing objective comparison parameters.	Assisted clicks and page bounce rate.
Transactional	Concise checkout pages, product pages with clear price tags and “Add to Cart” buttons.	Adding excessive distracting text in the checkout path, causing slower loading speed.	Conversion rate correlation with loading speed (LCP).

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“Google’s result page itself is a complete intent analysis report. By observing SERP features like ‘People Also Ask’ and ‘Featured Snippets,’ you can obtain the content framework necessary to compete for that term. If the result page shows many YouTube video windows, it indicates users for that keyword prefer video visual information—in this case, continuing to pile up text content will have diminishing effects.” — from Semrush Search Behavior Research Report

When evaluating content structure, Google has a patent for “Information Gain Score,” designed to reward pages providing “new information not mentioned by competitor pages.”

If the agency’s content is simply a rewrite of the top 5 search results’ viewpoints, this page’s information gain score will be very low.

Even if the page’s SEO technical metrics are all qualified, the algorithm will rank such pages lacking unique insights behind others to avoid search result homogenization.

A healthy SEO output should include more than 15% exclusive viewpoints, case study data, or industry survey results—this uniqueness can significantly reduce the page’s Pogo-sticking probability (users clicking in and immediately returning to search results).

To more precisely align with intent, agencies should use natural language processing (NLP) tools to analyze the top 10 pages’ entity density.

For example, when competing for “how to fix a coffee machine,” the top 3 pages average mentioning 25 related industry terms like “sealing ring,” “pressure valve,” and “descaling solution.”

If your page only mentions “fix” and “coffee machine,” Google will consider the content insufficiently professional to cover this topic.

According to Backlinko’s analysis, pages ranking #1 on Google average 1447 words, but word count itself isn’t the goal—it represents the semantic completeness needed to cover that search intent.

Page layout also affects algorithm evaluation.

For “how-to” content, Google expects to see clear step markers (such as HowTo schema markup). If the agency doesn’t use correct heading hierarchy in HTML (H1 as sole main heading, H2 for main steps, H3 for sub-explanations), or ignores mobile interaction experience (such as buttons too close to click), even rich content will suffer in mobile search rankings.

Backlink Quality

According to Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million search results, the #1 ranking page has on average 3.8 times more backlinks than the #10 page.

If the agency cannot provide a clear link growth path during operations, rankings typically remain fixed in the latter half of search results.

A healthy link profile shouldn’t pursue sheer quantity but should focus on substantial Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA) improvement.

When competitors’ average DR is 55, and your site DR remains at 15 long-term, with only 5-10 low-quality links added monthly, this mathematical gap makes your pages have almost no chance of ranking for competitive industry keywords.

The type of backlink source determines authority passing efficiency. Currently, the international mainstream SEO evaluation system typically categorizes links into several tiers:

• Top Tier Links: Coverage or guest posts from high-traffic media like Forbes, TechCrunch, The Guardian—these links typically have DR above 80 and provide significant authority endorsement for the site.
• Niche Relevant Links: Links from same-industry blogs, resource aggregation pages, or professional forums—even with DR only 30-50, their relevance for ranking improvement often outperforms unrelated super-high-authority links.
• Foundational Links: Includes social media profiles, high-quality industry directories, and business yellow pages (like Yelp, Yellow Pages)—these links primarily balance link profile naturalness.
• Toxic/Low Quality Links: Links from auto-generated blog comments, low-end PBN (Private Blog Networks), or scraper sites—these links easily trigger Google’s SpamBrain filter mechanism.

Link velocity (link growth speed) is another easily overlooked variable.

If the agency uses automated tools to instantly add 500 low-quality links from different countries in the first month of collaboration, then falls silent for several months—this unnatural fluctuation triggers algorithm spam suspicion checks.

An Ahrefs study shows that healthy link growth curves should present smooth upward trends.

For SaaS sites or e-commerce platforms in early stages, acquiring 20-40 high-quality referring domains per month is a relatively ideal pace.

Over-optimizing target keyword anchor text distribution leads to ranking drops.

In natural link environments, most links should exist as brand terms (like “Company Name”), naked URLs, or generic terms (like “click here”).

If your GSC data shows 80% of backlinks are specific “commercial keywords” like “Best wireless headphones,” this makes the links appear highly artificially manipulated.

According to the generally accepted golden ratio, brand anchor text should account for over 50%, miscellaneous terms 20%, naked links 20%, and exact-match commercial keyword anchor text is recommended to be controlled below 5%.

Google can identify whether links on pages have actual clicks.

If a backlink is located at the bottom of a page with no traffic, no indexing, and filled with ads, the authority it passes is nearly zero.

Agencies should provide link resources that can truly reach audiences—for example, embedding links in professional answers on Quora or Reddit, or obtaining journalist citations through HARO (Help A Reporter Out).

You can review the agency’s work through these specific quantitative metrics:

• Net increase in referring domains: After excluding lost links monthly, whether the number of new high-quality referring domains meets expectations.
• DR improvement curve: Whether the site’s Domain Rating has stepped growth within 6-12 months (e.g., from DR 10 to DR 30).
• Dofollow ratio: While Nofollow links add naturalness, Dofollow links that pass authority should account for 60-80% of total links.
• Geographic distribution: If your target market is the US but 90% of links come from India, Russia, or Brazil—this severe geographic mismatch causes rankings to stagnate in target markets.

If ranking improvement is completely decoupled from link growth—links are increasing but rankings remain unchanged—this usually indicates added links are “invalid links” or spam automatically ignored by Google.

Metric Evaluation

Google officially integrated Core Web Vitals into the ranking algorithm in 2021. According to Google’s officially published data, when loading time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, mobile user bounce rate increases by 32%.

If the agency only fills pages with content while ignoring server response and front-end rendering, rankings often stagnate behind competitors.

This technical bottleneck typically stems from Time to First Byte (TTFB) being too high—the server’s time to first byte response exceeds 600 milliseconds.

In high-competition search results, the top 3 ranked sites maintain TTFB between 200-350 milliseconds on average.

If the site’s LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) exceeds 2.5 seconds, the algorithm determines the page can’t provide a good user experience, thereby limiting its display frequency in mobile search results.

Technical Evaluation Dimension	Ideal Threshold (Good)	Warning Threshold (Needs Improvement)	Impact on Search Engine Crawlers
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)	< 2.5 seconds	2.5 – 4.0 seconds	Affects page “experience score” in search results; high latency causes crawl frequency decline.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)	< 200 ms	200 – 500 ms	Measures page interaction smoothness; replaced original FID metric as a new ranking consideration.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)	< 0.1	0.1 – 0.25	Unstable layout causes user misclicks; Google reduces authority scores for such pages.
TTFB (Time to First Byte)	< 0.8 seconds	0.8 – 1.5 seconds	Slow response causes Googlebot to consider server load too high, reducing index requests.
HTTPS Status	Must be enabled	N/A	Security protocol is the foundation of all ranking efforts; non-encrypted connections cause search downgrading.
Robots.txt Validity	0 syntax errors	Contains Disallow for important paths	Incorrect directives may block important pages from indexing, completely invalidating SEO efforts.

For medium and large websites with over 1,000 pages, Googlebot’s daily crawl allocation is limited.

If the agency fails to properly handle internal 301 redirect chains or numerous 404 error pages, crawlers consuming excessive resources on these invalid paths will cause newly published or optimized pages to fail to be re-indexed in a timely manner.

Many duplicate content URLs (like dynamic links with unnecessary parameters) create “crawl traps,” preventing search engines from accurately identifying which is the canonical version that should be ranked.

In Google Search Console (GSC)’s crawl statistics report, if the proportion of “not crawled due to server issues” exceeds 1%, this usually indicates hosting environment stability problems—this unstable online status causes algorithms to reduce trust in the site.

Modern websites heavily use React, Vue, and other frameworks for client-side rendering. If agencies don’t know how to implement server-side rendering (SSR) or dynamic rendering, Googlebot can only see a blank HTML structure when crawling.

Although Google claims it can handle JavaScript, the second round of indexing (Rendering Queue) is often delayed by days or even weeks compared to plain text crawling.

If your web pages load over 1MB of unused JavaScript scripts, this not only slows LCP but also causes main thread blocking, turning INP metrics red and affecting search ranking improvement.

Under mobile-first indexing, Google now almost entirely decides rankings based on mobile version content and performance.

If mobile page CSS rendering blocks above-the-fold display, or images don’t provide responsive sizes for mobile devices (srcset), even if PC search results are good, overall rankings will be dragged down.

Using WebP or AVIF formats to replace traditional PNG/JPG images can reduce page weight by 30-50%—this is a common means to improve loading efficiency.

At the same time, check for “lightweight mobile page” vs “full version page” content inconsistency. If mobile side deletes critical structured data (Schema Markup) for speed, the algorithm will consider mobile page information density insufficient to provide complete search answers to users, and will assign rankings to competitor sites with more complete information.

Using Schema.org-defined JSON-LD code helps search engines understand page entity relationships (Entities), such as product prices, inventory status, ratings, and FAQs.

If the agency ignores numerous warnings about syntax errors in GSC’s “Enhancements” report, the page can’t display differentiated information like stars or prices in search results, already placing it at a visual disadvantage.

You can verify work progress by requesting the agency provide a detailed technical audit checklist:

• Check GSC’s “Core Web Vitals” report: Confirm whether the proportion of URLs in “Good” status is increasing month over month.
• Check indexing status: In the “Pages” report, whether many “Crawled – not indexed” pages exist—this is typically a signal of content quality or technical authority deficiency.
• Compare mobile compatibility: Use Chrome DevTools’ Lighthouse plugin, run audits in mobile mode, and observe whether performance scores are above 90.
• Analyze server logs: Observe Googlebot’s access frequency—normally, optimized pages should see crawlers return within 48 hours.

If technical metrics remain in “yellow” or “red” warning status for months on end, then any investment in content and backlinks cannot translate into substantial ranking improvement.

Content Doesn’t Meet E-E-A-T Standards

In Google’s multiple rounds of updates in 2024, pages lacking real experience were largely downranked, with some sites experiencing traffic declines exceeding 60%.

The current “Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines” is 168 pages long, explicitly requiring content to include first-hand testing data, real expert backgrounds, and verifiable citations.

If the agency’s articles have average CTR below 1% in Google Search Console and contain no specific experimental results or expert signatures, their output hasn’t met the algorithm’s quality threshold.

Lack of Real Experience

In the current Google search algorithm system, if the agency’s output has semantic overlap exceeding 85% with the top 10 search results, that page will be marked as “redundant information” in the algorithm database, thus failing to achieve ideal impressions.

For example, when writing a technical guide about “AWS EC2 instance configuration,” if content only lists steps already available in official documentation without recording the 504 Gateway Timeout error encountered during deployment and the specific Nginx configuration file modification parameters, this content will be judged as lacking first-hand experience.

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines clearly state that for content involving product reviews or technical tutorials, authors must demonstrate physical contact with products or actual operation of software.

Evaluation Item	Signs of Lacking Experience (Low Quality Signals)	Signs of Real Experience (High Quality Signals)
Visual Evidence Density	Uses 1200px wide Unsplash library images with empty file metadata (EXIF).	Contains real photos with author’s workstation background, or includes software backend screenshots with specific timestamps (e.g., 2024-05-12 14:30:05).
Data Granularity	Described as “speed significantly improved” or “response very fast.”	Lists specific benchmark data, for example: “TTFB (Time to First Byte) reduced from 850ms to 120ms, an 85.8% improvement”.
Text Language Characteristics	Extensive use of third-person narration like “generally,” “usually.”	Frequent first-person narration with specific scenarios: “When I tried running this script in Node.js 20.x environment, memory usage peaked at 1.2GB.”
External Verification Connections	No links to third-party communities (like Stack Overflow, Reddit).	References discussions about this problem in specific communities, or includes specific GitHub Repo commit record numbers.

Content lacking experience typically performs in Google Search Console as:

Even if the page is indexed, its “average position” remains permanently beyond position 30, and due to lacking unique perspectives, the page’s “bounce rate” usually stays above 90%.

Google’s current NLP (Natural Language Processing) models can identify the difference between “synthetic text” and “practical text.”

For example, in a topic about “Shopify store decoration,” if the agency’s article doesn’t mention specific Liquid code line 45 modification suggestions, or doesn’t mention adaptation deviations at different resolutions (like 375×812 iPhone 13 screen), the algorithm will consider the author hasn’t actually performed store decoration.

When evaluating a 2,000-word article delivered by the agency, if original research data accounts for less than 5% and there’s no comparative analysis for specific environments (like different OS versions, different geographic IP test results), this content’s production cost is extremely low—typically completed by junior editors rewriting the top 5 results.

In multiple algorithm adjustments in 2024, Google significantly elevated the weight of Reddit and Quora forums, because these platforms’ replies contain large amounts of “unstructured real experience.”

If your website content can’t provide measured details more in-depth than Reddit posts, such as specific A/B test conversion rate differences (improvement path from 2.1% to 3.4%), the page’s competitiveness on SERPs will quickly erode.

Metric Type	Quantitative Threshold for Lacking Real Experience	Ideal Real Experience Quantitative Metrics
Semantic Repetition Rate	Text cosine similarity with top 5 search results > 0.8.	Introduces at least 3 professional terms or specific operational variables not mentioned in the top 10 pages.
Image-Text Correlation	High proportion of image placeholders but not one contains specific parameter-annotated charts.	At least one self-made chart or data screenshot showing specific experimental results per 500 words.
Long-tail Keyword Coverage	Only covers high-traffic generic terms, no “error codes” or “version numbers.”	Covers at least 10 long-tail keywords with specific version numbers (like v2.4.1) or specific error codes (like Error 1006).
User Retention	Average engagement time < 30 seconds.	Average engagement time exceeds 1.5x industry average (typically > 120 seconds).

Google’s knowledge graph judges authenticity based on specific parameters, models, locations appearing in pages and their relationships with other known entities.

If an article about “best boutique hotels in London” has details completely available from Booking.com’s public descriptions, without mentioning “45 decibels of low-frequency noise from the nearby subway station at 7 AM”—details only knowable through actual stays—the algorithm won’t mark the author as an “experienced person” in this field.

When evaluating content quality, focus on whether the text contains “failure case postmortems.”

Real experience necessarily includes documentation of wrong paths—if an article describes perfect processes throughout without pointing out “100% connection failure if port 443 opening is overlooked during configuration”—this content is extremely risky and lacks reference value in Google’s view.

Lack of Professional Background

In Google’s Knowledge Graph algorithm logic, if the agency’s delivered content lacks attribution with industry background, or the author has no verifiable professional track record online, the page’s weight in search results will be significantly suppressed.

If an article’s author has less than 3 years of work experience on LinkedIn, or their name never appears in citation lists on .edu or .org sites in related fields, that content’s Expertise score often cannot break the basic threshold.

Professional Evaluation Metric	Signals of Lacking Professional Background	Signs of Having Professional Background
Author Entity Association	Author name has no independent Knowledge Panel in Google search.	Author is associated with WikiData ID or has ORCID unique identifier.
Terminology Usage Density	Uses generic terms (like “cybersecurity”).	Uses advanced terminology (like “Zero Trust Architecture” or “OAuth 2.0 Grant Types”).
External Citation Sources	Links to Wikipedia or traffic-based blogs.	Cites SEC Filings, IEEE conference papers, or industry standard protocols (like RFC 7519).
Content Semantic Depth	Stays on surface level describing “what it is.”	Deeply explores “underlying implementation principles” or “specific parameter marginal effects”.

Under NLU (Natural Language Understanding) model scanning, expert-written text typically has a higher proportion of “rare industry association terms.”

For example, when discussing SaaS product subscription models, non-professional authors might only mention “monthly” or “annual,” while true domain experts will analyze “LTV/CAC ratio’s impact on Deferred Revenue” in detail, citing specific accounting standards like ASC 606.

If such professionally壁垒 details account for less than 15% of the agency’s articles, the algorithm will judge the content as “non-expert-generated generic text.”

This judgment will cause the page to be flagged as high-risk in YMYL (Your Money Your Life) reviews, leading to overall site rankings dropping more than 40% during Core Updates.

Google’s algorithm can cross-platform track author identity. If an author writes in the medical health field but their digital history shows they’re primarily writing fashion or entertainment news, this “cross-domain identity mismatch” will cause the content’s credibility score to plummet.

In a test of 1,000 medical keywords, articles signed by authors with MD (Doctor of Medicine) credentials and active Google Scholar profiles ranked an average of 12 positions higher than anonymous articles.

If agencies can’t provide real, professionally-credentialed author bios (including license numbers, industry awards, or academic achievements), they cannot establish the Trust Anchor required by algorithms.

Authority Verification

Google’s algorithm system defines a site’s authority level through “external consensus.”

Authority doesn’t just depend on backlink extensions but more on the site’s position within a specific entity network (Entity Network).

For example, a SaaS website providing cybersecurity solutions—if its brand name doesn’t appear in Gartner, Forrester, or IDC industry reports, and its Crunchbase funding information and technology patent data are empty, the algorithm will identify it as low-authority.

According to Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines, raters check third-party independent sources’ evaluations of the entity, not just the entity’s self-described content.

• Top-tier industry site citations: Brand name or website link appears in high-authority (DR > 80) news or commentary articles from Forbes, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal.
• Academic and government associations: Received natural citations from .edu or .gov domains, particularly as a source for specific industry standards or research data.
• Vertical industry directory authority: Has over 50 independent user positive reviews on platforms like G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, with ratings maintained above 4.2.
• Brand direct search volume: Raw search volume for “brand name + industry term” (like: Ahrefs SEO Tool) exceeds 1,000 times per month.

Authority’s social proof also appears in “unlinked brand mentions.”

Modern search engines, through natural language processing technology, can identify brand names, office addresses, and CEO names appearing in web page text, and incorporate them into specific entities in the knowledge graph.

If an agency, during execution, only piles keyword-containing links on low-authority personal blogs without establishing brand entity-based discussion heat in mainstream industry forums (like Reddit related subreddits or Quora expert sections), this authority is false.

Within specific vertical fields, brands mentioned by over 20 high-authority sites (DA > 60) with positive semantic context typically start long-tail keyword rankings 15-25 positions higher than new brands.

When measuring authority, Google analyzes the site’s “citation clusters.”

The ideal state is citation sources distributed among relevant legal associations, court case databases, and well-known legal review journals.

This relevance can be quantified through the Topical Trust Flow metric—if this metric is below 20, it indicates the brand has extremely low recognition within its field.

Whether the site is included in Wikipedia or Wikidata as a factual reference source—once a brand is marked as an entity with a Wikipedia entry, its probability of appearing in Knowledge Panel on search result pages increases by over 80%, significantly enhancing search result trust.

• Social signals and entity interactions: Brand’s official accounts on platforms like LinkedIn, X (Twitter), YouTube have real subscriber counts, and published industry analysis content achieves over 5% engagement rate (Likes/Shares).
• Professional literature and white papers: Brand’s published industry white papers have been cited by third-party sites over 100 times, or included in Google Scholar‘s index.
• Geographic entity verification: Has a verified physical office address in Google Business Profile, with geographic location information completely consistent with website claims and government registration data.
• Consistent NAP data: Brand Name, Address, and Phone remain 100% character-level consistent across over 20 major business yellow pages and databases.

If agencies ignore maintenance of these non-link signals, the brand will lack real “social existence” in the algorithm’s view.