Google's Site Reputation Abuse spam policy - what’s it all about?
Updated: Jul 1
On the 6th of May, Googlers woke up to the ‘kraken’ of updates having been applied to results across well known websites. Now the site reputation abuse policy has started, what do we now about it?
Google has been working hard to provide better results recently, with the latest March core and spam updates allegedly resulting in 45% less low quality, unoriginal content in results.
The rollout of the site reputation abuse policy is another step to achieving better results, and a big blow to publishers who didn’t heed Google’s warnings. But was this update fair to all site owners?
Let’s get into it.
Note: as of 07/05/2024, it's been confirmed that the algorithmic component of this update isn't yet live - sites that have seen an impact have been manually penalised. The full impact of any site reputation abuse changes is yet to be seen.
What is site reputation abuse?
Site reputation abuse is where a website hosts low quality third-party content that is generally unrelated to the main website without close involvement or oversight of the website's owner. This content has no real value to users and is only hosted on the sites to drive organic traffic.
Because SEO’s love to give everything a name, you’ve probably heard the practice of doing this to intentionally influence rankings being referred to as ‘Parasite SEO’, and seedy marketers claimed it was the best thing since sliced bread for quickly and unsustainably spiking rankings.
Outside the world of search marketers, this has been a commonplace practice amongst publishers for many years, with common use cases being legitimately hosting coupon directories, or third-party reviews.
The issue that Google has identified with this practice is that users may click on these pages because they trust the authority of the main website, but are met with lower quality content than they are expecting.
Essentially, they’ve decided it’s deceptive and are now identifying it as spam in an effort to clean up search results.
Here’s the official line from Google about what qualifies as Site Reputation Abuse…
“Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals.” - Google Search Central spam policies documentation
Examples
Coupons and vouchers - publishers websites, usually news outlets, adding directories of third-party coupons to their sites. These are the kind of results you would see newspapers ranking for when you search for stuff like ‘ASOS discount codes’.
Reviews - a website hosting third-party reviews where they have had little to no involvement in the content. A common example would be a health and fitness website hosting reviews on the best diet pills.
Directories - 'parasite' directories created by third parties that are hosted on bigger, stronger websites
A Timeline
5th March 2024: Google announced three key changes to its spam policy. Two changes were applied to search alongside the March 2024 Core Update, but the third policy, focused on what Google refer to as Site Reputation Abuse, was earmarked to be rolled out on 5th May.
This was to give publishers a chance to put things right by either removing this content, or no-indexing it. A necessary warning shot for a practice that had been common amongst big publishers for many years.
5th May 2024: Google rolls the update out in full.
Results of the update & industry thoughts
As mentioned, website owners were given a chance to either no-index questionable pages, or tie up their partnerships with third-party sites.
Some publishers decided to risk it and have experienced the wrath of Google, either being removed from search for branded and non-branded queries, or being given manual action penalties. Oof.
One area that has seen a huge impact are websites who have coupon directories.
Sites like Business Insider, CNN, and Glamour have seen visibility decreases across subdomains hosting coupon directories, disappearing from the SERP for coupon related queries.
Source: Glenn Gabe, LinkedIn
Lily Ray has highlighted that the update has unfairly impacted publishers who have spent many years building relationships with coupon providers, and have put in the work to quality check the coupon codes that they host.
She makes the argument that people do find coupon pages helpful, and just because sites have been built specifically to host coupon codes, they aren’t automatically the better option to serve up in search results.
Source: Lily Ray, LinkeedIn
Some websites, like Forbes, have completely removed their coupon pages, having previously noindexed them. An argument can be made here that this proves they were only hosting coupon content to drive organic traffic, so really, since the content wasn't providing any real user value in their eyes - should it have existed on the site in the first place?
What happens next?
Once this change hits the algorithm, we're likely to see a lot more movement across different verticals. Only time will tell what the full impact will be.
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