Google Site Reputation Abuse Policy Expands To First Party Involvement Or Content Oversight

Google has updated its site reputation abuse policy to expand what is included in abuse. It now includes third-party content that has first-party involvement or content oversight. Google also dropped a mention of the starkly different content algorithm but made no mention that site reputation abuse is enforced algorithmically—so it must still be only through manual actions.

The updated site reputation abuse policy now says:

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.

Chris Nelson from the Google Search Quality team directly wrote, “We’re making it clear that using third party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site’s ranking signals is a violation of this policy — regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.”

“We’ve heard very clearly from users that site reputation abuse – commonly referred to as “parasite SEO” – leads to a bad search experience for people, and today’s policy update helps to crack down on this behavior. Site owners that are found to be violating this policy will be notified in their Search Console account,” Chris Nelson, Google Search Quality told me.

I am sure this is not going to make a lot of site’s – large and small – happy.

As a reminder, the site reputation abuse policy is still only enforced through manual actions – it is not algoritmic yet (Google does plan for it to be algorithmic one day). Google began manual enforcement of this policy back in May, after posting about the in March after announcing the Google March 2024 core update. Google then added a spam reporting tool, which it used to collect data on this abuse category.

Google said in its blog post yesterday, “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.”

Google did add, “It’s important to note that not all third-party content violates this policy. We go into detail on our spam policies page about what is and isn’t site reputation abuse.”

This is the second time Google updated its site reputation abuse policy, the first time was in September to include more examples.

Google also noted it has algorithms to detect and then not use site-wide signals for that content if the content sections that are independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. Google added, “Aside from site reputation abuse issues, we also have systems and methods designed to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. 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.” Google has said it has taken action against Parasite SEO techniques over the years, which is what Google calls site reputation abuse, in part.

Google also mentioned site-wide signals in the blog post, and linked to its ranking system guide. “Our efforts to understand differences in sections of sites can lead to traffic changes if sub-sections no longer benefit from site-wide signals. This doesn’t mean that these sub-sections have somehow been demoted or are in violation of our spam policies. It simply means we’re measuring them independently, even if they are located within a site,” Google wrote. I think that is to enforce the post from Glenn Gabe on site level signals and how Google has said numerous times, before and not after Google’s Pandu Nayak comments, that Google does have site-wide signals (which we covered here countless times, as Glenn notes in his article).

Here is a diff between the old and new site reputation abuse policy (click to enlarge):

So there you have it – this is a really big change to the Google site reputation abuse policy and you can expect many more sites to get hit by this update.

To those following the Site Reputation Abuse / Parasite SEO saga:

Great catch by @glenngabe and a big change on Google’s part (that many have been observing for weeks and months leading up to this)

Site reputation abuse:
– is still a violation when the first party (publisher… https://t.co/OnC3P8kfKE

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) November 19, 2024

And Forbes and many others were already hit by this, via Jason Kilgore on LinkedIn:

Here is CNN Underscored dropping already based on what looks like a manual action for ‘Site reputation abuse’. Others are seeing the same btw… And here is a site query for CNN Underscored. 10 urls. pic.twitter.com/QFQslUtIXX

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 20, 2024

Forum discussion at X.