Google: Expect To See Changes In Search Around Third Party Hosted Content

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said that while Google has updated its guidance around blocking third-party content, more is to come. Google said we should see things improve over time related to issues around third-party hosted content, sometimes referred to as parasite SEO.

As a reminder, when the September 2023 Google helpful content update came out, Google added new information to its documentation around this update. One thing specific to this documentation change was around hosted third-party content. That feature was just a documentation change, there was no change to search related to third party hosted content.

Well, Now Danny Sullivan said updating the documentation is “not the only action we’re taking,” he wrote on X. He added, “I hope and expect everyone will see things improve over time.”

“I’m also glad to see publishers following our guidance, as seems to be the case here. That contributes to improving,” he added.

Here are those tweets in context:

It is our problem to rank content well. We added guidance about blocking third party content as part of addressing this issue. It’s not the only action we’re taking. I hope and expect everyone will see things improve over time. I’m also glad to see publishers following our…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 13, 2023

Click through to scroll up through the whole conversation on X.

As a reminder, Google added this section, as noted above,”If you host third-party content on your main site or in your subdomains, understand that such content may be included in site-wide signals we generate, such as the helpfulness of content. For this reason, if that content is largely independent of the main site’s purpose or produced without close supervision or the involvement of the primary site, we recommend that it should be blocked from being indexed by Google.”

So I guess we can see Google cracking down on this soonish?

Forum discussion at X.

Update: Maybe it has begun?

As an example, here’s a parasite SEO situation where the directory containing sponsored content TANKED with the Nov 2023 core update. But, the site overall is totally fine. So again, seems like Google wants to be granular with impacting the parasite SEO situation. Again, stay… pic.twitter.com/SXQzKG1vtW

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 14, 2023