Google increases crackdown on “site reputation abuse”

Search giant is demoting third-party content published on other websites to take advantage of their search reputation.

Google is continuing to crack down on so-called “site reputation abuse” which it defines as “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.”

Some examples that Google provides are:

• An educational site hosting a page about reviews of payday loans written by a third-party that distributes the same page to other sites across the web, with the main purpose of manipulating search rankings
• A movie review site hosting third-party pages about topics that would be confusing to users to find on a movie review site (such as “ways to buy followers on social media sites”, the “best fortune teller sites”, and the “best essay writing services”), where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings

A lot of big sites do this, and Google started attacking the problem this year.

There can be varying levels of agreements between site operators and the third parties that post content on their sites. In a blog post this week, Google clarified:

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.

Of course, this says nothing about first-party content that has little to do with the primary purpose of the site. I’m hearing that Google has also cracked down on this. An example is Forbes, which is ostensibly a business site, writing about…well, anything. Actual examples on Forbes include stories about the best ski goggles and tennis shoes.