Image: N N on Unsplash
Google has clarified its site reputation abuse policy, which was launched in May this year. The policy targets a practice also known as parasite seo, where third parties place content on authoritative websites to elevate their own search rankings.
Since the policy was launched, Google has undertaken a review of situations where there might be varying degrees of first party involvement or oversight such as white-label services, licensing agreements etc. Google says:
“Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host's sites ranking signals.”
Accordingly, Google has now made it clear that third party content aiming to exploit the host site’s ranking signals is a violation of this policy, whether or not there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.
The updated policy wording reads:
“Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals.”
When the policy was first announced, Google started implementing manual actions against offending sites immediately. It seems not to have wasted any time with the update either.
SEO Glenn Gabe reported on X that manual actions had started going out based on the update, to sites including Forbes Advisor and CNN Underscored.
Site owners who receive a spam manual action are notified through their Search Console account and will be able to submit a request for reconsideration.
For sites which try to get around the manual penalty by moving the offending directories to a new location on the domain which isn’t impacted, the advice is - don’t. As Glenn Gabe pointed out on X, this would come under Policy Circumvention in Google’s guidelines which state that sites trying to bypass spam or content policies may be penalized.
Both page level and site-wide signals are used in Google’s ranking systems.
In its post on the spam update, Google said its systems understand if a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. These are then treated as standalone sites.
“By treating these areas as if they are standalone sites, it better ensures a level playing field, so that sub-sections of sites don't get a ranking boost just because of the reputation of the main site.”
Not all third party content violates the site reputation abuse policy. Google's full spam policies provide details about what does and what doesn’t constitute site reputation abuse.
