Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Earlier this year, as part of our
work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience, we launched a spam policy to combat
site reputation abuse.
This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take
advantage of the host’s already-established ranking signals. The goal of this tactic is for
the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad
search experience for users.
Since launching the policy, we’ve reviewed situations where there might be varying degrees of
first-party involvement, such as cooperation with white-label services, licensing agreements,
partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements. 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.
We’re clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior.
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. Our updated policy language, effective
today, is:
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 evaluating for policy violations, we take into account many different considerations
(and we don’t simply take a site’s claims about how the content was produced at face value)
to determine if third-party content is being used in an abusive way. Site owners who receive a
spam manual
action will be notified through their registered
Search Console
account and can submit a
reconsideration
request.
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.
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. As we continue to work to improve these systems, this helps us
deliver the most useful information from a range of sites.
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 means we’re measuring them independently, even if they are located
within a site.
This clarification to our site reputation abuse policy will help surface the most useful search
results, combat manipulative practices, and ensure that all sites have an equal opportunity
to rank based on the quality of their content. We encourage site owners to familiarize
themselves with this updated policy and focus on building high-quality websites that prioritize
content created to benefit people,
not to gain search engine rankings.
