Google Confirms Google Sites Are “Not Ideal For SEO Purposes”

By Chris Barnhart On Sep 7, 2023

Google’s John Mueller offered advice about the use of Google Sites for SEO, downplaying the usefulness of Google Sites for SEO.

Google Sites

Google Sites is a website creation service offered at sites.google.com/new with a signed-in Google account.

The site is hosted website builder that’s free and published under a sites.google.com domain although one can opt to use an actual domain name.

Google Sites Pages Not Being Indexed

The person asking the question was concerned because their Google Sites webpages were not getting indexed by Google.

This is the question that was asked and that John Mueller read out loud:

“There was a question submitted in French, which basically asks why the pages of my Google Sites website aren’t being indexed properly.”

Google Sites Pages Can Be Indexed By Google

Google’s John Mueller first confirmed that URLs on Google Sites can be indexed.

Mueller answered:

“It’s great to get questions in other languages.

Google Sites Not Ideal For SEO

Mueller continued his answer by downplaying the SEO qualities of Google Sites.

He continued:

“To be blunt, while it’s technically indexable, it’s not ideal for SEO purposes, and can be complex for tracking in Search Console.

Google Sites Are Popular With Spammers

The Google Sites service is popular with link spammers who create links on Google subdomains in a tactic called “Google Stacking.”

The idea behind Google Stacking is that spammers create a page of links on Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc. and then interlink them all from a Google Sites.

Google Stacking is a based on the mistaken belief that there’s “authority” and “trust” in Google subdomains that is transferred over to the spammer sites through links.

Of course, that’s wishful thinking.

There’s no such thing used by Google called “trust” or “authority” that gets transferred from one site to another through links.