On 24th October SEO professional Glenn Gabe published a long and detailed post showing how site abusing reputation (also known as parasite SEO) are declining one by one in search ranking. Glenn shared examples of decline in search visibility of Forbes Advisor, APNEWs Buyline, WSJ Buyside and some others sites too.
Glenn also said that it might be site reputation abuse algorithm.
In response to this post, Googler Danny Sullivan confirmed with Glenn that these recent declines in ranking of these big publishers is not testing of site reputation abuse algorithm.
And later in another update Glenn shared that he got another response from Google saying
“Our systems aim to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites.”
Also Google cited some of their tweets from 2019 which says “our systems are being improved to better know when such content is independent of the main site & treat accordingly”
And with the recent site reputation abuse policy update Google said
“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.”
So now its almost like if a publisher have been just writing about let’s say politics and suddenly a new page about “best crypto” pops up on that site then Google will be treating that page as starkly different content and will not be applying domain level boost to it.
But this also raises another question – what if a site want to expand? and start writing about other topics. How will Google be treating that? My guess is that initially it will be treated as starkly different content (not get domain level boost) but when over time there will be a lot of that content on site then Google will start treating it differently.
But again Google now is saying “Our efforts to understand differences in sections of sites can lead to traffic changes” and also “It means we’re measuring them independently, even if they are located within a site”.
So it might be possible that content related to different topics hosted in a site might be treated as two independent sites almost like site in a site kind of thing.
I think that this change might be a challenge for SEOs like me who often work with site owners to help them expand categories.
Here are some examples which I think are “starkly different” content!!
More examples of starkly different content which otherwise should be treated as a standalone site and shouldn’t get domain level boost.
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