Contact Info On A Website Is Not An Organic Ranking Signal

When it comes to organic ranking signals there are always grey areas and one can never be sure if something is true or false. In this case Google’s John Mueller gave us information on the contact information in a web site, and if it is an organic ranking signal.

This happened in a Google Hangout on Google+ on the 8th of July. The question towards John was about contact information on news websites, and if the lack of it can cause worse rankings in Google News. John said that he doesn’t know about Google News but as for normal web search it is not a core signal that shouldn’t be taken into account.

Here are his exact words:

I really appreciate it when contact information is there because that means we could potentially contact you when things go wrong. So this is a case that happens every couple of days, where someone from the indexing team will come to us and say hey, this web site did something completely stupid, they accidentally put not index on all of their pages or they robots.txt everything out.

Can you contact the webmaster to fix this thing so it doesn’t cause any problems for them in search. And if we have no way of contacting this webmaster because there is no contact information on the web site, then we can’t really help out in a case like this.