publishing unrelated topics content? consider this ...
What does it mean by unrelated topic? Like for example if your a car dealership site but your writing content about pants that’s called unrelated topic content and Google officially calls it starkly content because its totally different from the main topic of site (being a car dealership).
But some sites like news publishers write about everything? a lot of topics I think in those cases its not about unrelated topics because having information about different topics (like politics, sports, entertainment) all at the same place is what users expect from news sites.
But if a site like GeeksForGeeks whose primary topic is programming related content but branches out into different topics like children of different famous personalities then it becomes a problem, if its being done at scale.
I think that’s why GeeksForGeeks recently got a manual action for “Thin content with little or no added value“ which led to no page from their site showing up in Google’s search results. But eventually after 16 days the action was lifted because they cleaned up the site and submitted request for getting manual action lifted.
But in general it can become problematic if a site is publishing content about too many topics.
Scale of that unrelated topics? Impact on percentage of search queries that users are doing? and might be going to those pages & probably from user interactions Google picking up a tonne of negative signals. That's something that led to the penalty.
That's why to few publishers (which haven't gotten a penalty yet) I have recommended to stop publishing unrelated content and if it's not getting that much traffic then noindex those pages because when Web Spam team will look for "scale of search results ruined" those 1000s of unrelated topics content each getting couple of search visitors a month will just add up. And will become a factor for Google to issue the penalty.
Also even recently Google is going after unrelated topics content on sites since Nov 2024 when they updated the site reputation abuse policy and in there they mentioned different subsections losing site wide signals? That's what happened with HubSpot algorithmically in Feb 2025 and that’s why their pages suddenly dropped in search rankings, back then I explained this in one of my LinkedIn post.
Also I’ve been asked what if a site is publishing unrelated topics content? but its high quality content? I think even this can be somewhat problematic?
Because on 27th March 2025 Google changed the definition of spam?
Earlier it used to be “spam is web content” but it was changed to “spam refers to techniques” & its no longer about quality of the content.
And even during Search Central Event in New York in March - Search Liaison to SEO Community Danny Sullivan said this.
Clearly saying that “Quality” of the content doesn’t make a difference.
That’s why I think even if publishing high quality but totally unrelated content to the topic of site then should be careful because it might lead to some issue, if that publishing of unrelated content is being done at scale.
Also this applies to AI generated content too like
It's no longer a question of generated by AI but is quality? because from policy perspective now content isn't something that Google looks for to issue penalties rather it's the technique (AI) which they now are looking for to issue penalties.
Quality content created using humans Ok
But similar quality content created using AI - not Ok and will most likely get a scaled content abuse policy violation manual action, if it's being done at scale by a site.
Also couple of weeks I wrote a whole LinkedIn post explaining use of AI generated content and explained it properly given that now from policies perspective spam isn’t content but technique being used.
So should you publish unrelated topics content or continue to do so? I don’t know because there isn’t a single answer to it. And it just depends upon a lot of factors, if your looking for some guidance around this then best is to contact me and provide me specifics of your sites. Then based upon my analysis, I can give specific recommendations on what you should do about unrelated topics content.