Gagan Ghotra

Recently Google coined a word “starkly different” and now at recent Search Central event in Zurich Googler Danny Sullivan further said that “I think you’re going to continue to see more work along these lines”.

In theory this idea of treating different sections of site differently is amazing because it leads to less spamming of search results by big publishers writing anything that they like. Some large publishers writing “best socks to buy during Christmas holidays” like WHAT while they have nothing to do with socks and there whole editorial is about actual news.

But these type of content was and even still is ranking at top positions in Google’s Search results (& of course getting a lot visibility in Discover too which recently is just full of big publishers leaving out SMB publishers).

Even though this treatment of site in a site seems amazing from perspective of actually helpful content showing up in Google’s Search Results (which I would love to see) but at the same time over last couple of weeks since Google started to rollout manual actions for site reputation abuse I’ve heard some concerns from different publishers site owners too.

Main concerns are
– If Google is treating different topical content as if its a standalone site right now in Dec 2024? or its something which is coming in 2025 and will be executed at scale therefore impacting ranking of their sites!

As of now I’m not sure! What’s the scale of this? and if & when Google will scale this further next year and beyond. I hope that once this goes live at scale then Google will let us know but I don’t know if they will.

– How to structure content of the site to align with this change? What to do and what not to do?

Keep the different content separate either using sub domains or sub folders. For example – if writing about politics and shoes then some options can be
example.com/politics/
example.com/shoes/

OR

politics.example.com
shoes.example.com

– Best strategy to grow and add a new topic to the site?

Before I would say anything. Just be careful that going forward don’t have expectation of adding completely new topic to the site and assume that because of existing authority of site all those new topic pages will start to rank immediately.

So if let’s have been writing about food for last 10 years and now want to also start writing about politics then first make sure to have right structure like what I have mentioned above.

Secondly when you will start to publish those new politics related pages – expect no immediate ranking and traffic because as this topic is totally different from existing main content of your site that’s why Google will consider this as starkly different content and this will not get any domain level signals.

Which means its almost like starting a new site. And you would have to build user trust for that topic just like someone launching a completely new domain will do.

I think this might seems complicated for publishers but I think that goal of Google doing this is right because it helps Google to deliver the most useful information from a range of sites in its search results.

– Just launch a new site because of this site in a site treatment? is that better??

If possible that’s better I think. Because it helps to keep things separate and build individual domain as a recognised brand. But as I mentioned above adding sub folders or domains is fine too but that will not be getting domain level signals.

– Launch a new site and link heavily from high authority site to that new site?

This one is interesting and today this was asked to me by SEO team of a publisher here in Australia, they haven’t gotten a manual action for their parasite subfolders yet but they are expecting it, and that’s why preparing things for future and want to move their subfolder content to a new domain.

Which is fine to do! But that doesn’t mean to leverage existing high authority of domain and to pass it to new domain (therefore rank it higher in search results quickly) you should do excessive linking from higher authority one to the new domain.

You have to make sure that there are not too many links from higher authority site to the new site because that might lead to Link Spam policy violation that Unnatural links from your site manual action for higher authority site and Unnatural links to your site manual action for the new domain. Which lead to loosing significant search visibility for both of sites.

Which of course no publisher would like to happen! That’s why making sure there is not too much unnatural links from higher authority to new domain is the best way forward.

NOTE – this one is about moving content from a subfolder to new domain but if already got a manual action for that subfolder for abuse of site reputation then moving that content to a new domain is fine but have to make sure that there are no redirects of URLs because redirects will likely transfer the manual action to new domain (that’s what Google has said) therefore leading to de indexing of that domain from Google’s Search results.

That’s it

I think that post 19 Nov when Google updated the site reputation abuse policy and started to remove otherwise revenue driving pages from its search results. That has lead to shock waves and now even if publishers who are abusing site reputation but haven’t gotten a manual action yet are looking for ways around what they can do to prepare for 2025 (I’ve noticed this here in Australia where I’m based, I’m not sure about other countries though).

And at the same time because nowadays I’m working with some publishers who are writing about a lot of topics on the same domain, I’m also thinking of ways how to mitigate the ranking impact of Google not passing domain level signals to those different subsections of sites. That’s why I’ve been studying this starkly thing and of course talking to other SEOs and publishers here in Australia.

I will keep an eye on this and if there’s is anything new from Google about this. I will write about it, meanwhile if you want to add anything to this or want to ask me something about this topic. You can just submit a question via this contact form or I’m available on both Twitter (X) and LinkedIn you can msg me there as well.