Last month today!
On 19 Nov Google out of nowhere updated Site Reputation Abuse policy and started to issue manual actions for abuse of the policy. Forbes Advisor was the main one who was completed removed out of Google’s Search Results (there were many others too).
There was some interesting discussion about this policy and affiliate content on X which I summarised here citing some of my own posts and posts from other SEO professionals too. At the same time some folks in the industry were concerned about the impact of this on jobs of people.
At the same time some folks in the industry were complaining that Google didn’t give them enough warnings or time. While I was the one saying that this policy is right and Google already gave enough time to abusing publishers to correct course.
Also on 6th Dec Google added 9 different FAQs to the policy explaining some specific questions and I’m glad that they provided clear answers! This helped me a lot while advising publishers on these policy violations and in some cases advising publishers who are actually abusing the policy nowadays but haven’t got a manual action (glad that they want to correct course 😃)
Speaking of working with publishers to help get this manual action for site reputation abuse lifted. This week I found that just no indexing the abusing pages isn’t enough at all rather changing the site level editorial info is also something that Google’s web spam team is considering while assessing if some request for lifting of action will be approved or not. I wrote about this today sharing some details and a screenshot of email that I got from Google’s web spam team.
This can be helpful for publisher SEO teams who are working on getting these manual actions lifted.
And talking about what’s future of this and how I think Google should move ahead with this policy?
I guess its almost impossible for Google’s web spam team to look at things case by case and see if there is any abuse of site reputation & then issue a manual action.
Its not possible practically!
Rather the algorithm for handling this at scale would be the best thing (but Google already told that its not coming any time soon and if & when it will Google confirmed they will announce it) and I think that starkly different, treating of topical content as if site in a site & loosing domain level signals is something which also helps to control the abuse of Google’s Search ranking systems from the sites publishing totally different content than main topic of their site & trying to rank for everything! (commonly called parasite SEO)
What’s the future of site reputation abuse policy?? I don’t know but there are some publishers putting pressure on Google around this and have sent a letter to Department of Justice (DOJ) and at the same time things with Google’s antitrust case are heating up.
Let’s see where things land early next year!
Leave a Reply