Google’s SearchLiaison confirmed that the Google site reputation abuse update began on Monday, May 6. Many sites around the web removed web pages that could be perceived as hosting third-party content in order to rank in search engines.
Abuse of site reputation
An old strategy that has recently made a comeback is one where a marketer will bring their content to another website to rank in the search engines. The best way to describe the practice is a publisher approaching another publisher’s website.
Some newbie marketers slapped the awkward SEO name of the parasite into practice. Parasite SEO is an inept name for this strategy because a parasite subsists on an unwilling host, but this ranking approach is by agreement and not one site attacking another without permission.
However, this is not a low-level affiliate marketing strategy. It’s also one practiced by many major brands, especially for credit cards and product reviews.
Google targets third-party content
This specific spam policy is aimed at sites that host third-party content where the host publisher has little to do with the content published on their site. However, it takes more than just hosting third-party content to be flagged as spam.
Google’s formal definition is:
“Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the goal is to manipulate search rankings by exploiting one’s own site’s ranking signals. These pages of third parties include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site’s primary purpose or produced without close supervision or involvement of the host site and that provide little or no value to users .
Google’s SearchLiaison confirmed in a tweet that the policy went into effect today.
he he tweeted:
“It will start later today. Even though the policy started yesterday, the implementation really starts today.”
Some big brand sites have recently removed sections of their site that featured product reviews that have no evidence that the reviewer actually handled the reviewed products. The reviews did not have original product photos, product measurements or test results.
Read Google’s site reputation abuse guidelines.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Lets Design Studio
