Gagan Ghotra

no indexing Site Reputation Abuse affected pages isn’t enough, sites have to make broad changes around editorial policy. Nowadays I’m working with a publisher who got the penalty for abuse and noindexed the content but penalty wasn’t lifted after submitting the request. Read more about this in my article.

Site Reputation Abuse policy was updated by Google on 19th Nov and now they have added FAQs to the policy explaining some questions. In total Google have added 9 different FAQs explaining things and I have written a detailed post about it, sharing my thoughts on each of FAQ.

Google virtually gave infinite time to big pubs for correcting things around Site Reputation Abuse.

> Site Reputation Abuse(SRA) announced in March – gave time until 5th May

> When time came they just issued Manual Actions and many well known abusers of policy were left out

> Then Googler Danny said algo for this is not coming any time soon

> Only recently after policy change some abusers got Manual Actions which also seems to be US abusers only while big pubs in Australia, New Zealand, India are still showing up in search results BUT per policy change deserve a manual action.

And we still don’t know when algo will go live OR when out side US big pubs abusing the policy will get penalty.

I think that Google should have started implementing the policy when they first announced it on 5th March. Should have not given any time like they did for some reason!

It was reported on 21 Nov that Forbes Advisor got a manual action for abusing site reputation and that same day it was showing up in AI Overviews.

But I expected that soon it will stop showing up in AI Overviews because it might be possible that AI Overviews are being generated using the Google search results index which is not updated yet.

Today its 25 Nov and I’m still seeing Forbes Advisor showing up in AI Overviews for query “best seo”

I will keep trying queries and will update here once it stopped showing up in AI Overviews.

Note – dates mentioned here are per my local Melbourne, Australia time GMT+10 according to your local time these dates might be different

Google recently has updated site reputation abuse policy. Today SEO professional Lily Ray posted this on X and mentioned “In other words, it’s the affiliate content itself that’s the problem”.

She said this in context of specific websites which are penalised.

To this SEO professional Darth replied “Yet apparently – that massive warning just wasn’t enough! If G are doing it properly, it boils down to: 1) Content that is managed/controlled by 3rd parties (thus why it’s not really “parasite”) 2) Content that doesn’t quite match the primary “site” (topic, purpose etc.)” To this my reply was “I think its more of 2) that you said. What’s intent of creating that content even if its written by in house writers??

is intent to exploit domain level boost to rank some page for a keyword? and before this “starkly” different thing may come in.

if page is “starkly” different from main content then analyse if intent of creation of page is to exploit domain level boost to manipulate search results for some keywords.

but if a site keeps on creating “starkly” different content from main content then over time that new set pages becomes another cluster and is treated as separate section & not get boost from domain level while its an independent site in the site.”

I suggest checking out whole discussion and replies over on X

Forbes Advisor got manual penalty for site reputation abuse.

Google has made some changes to Site Reputation Abuse policy and my best guess is this new policy will apply to Google Discover too. Previously back in May Google said that a spam policy applies for all of Google Search, of which Discover is part of.

As an active user of Google Discover myself I’ve been noticing a lot of spam in my feed, even others have shared similar user experience and its been full of mass generated (not helpful) content from big publishers while its supposed to show interesting & helpful content to users.

I hope that with these new changes coming in we will get to see less of shit content in Discover and more helpful content will get visibility.

Google has updated the Site Reputation Abuse policy and now its defined as “Site reputation abuse is 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.”

This screenshot from Search Engine Roundtable shows what was it and what it is now & a side by side comparison of two. Also Google is now issuing Manual Actions for abuse of the policy. Well know big publishers doing parasite SEO are affected by this, Forbes Advisor & CNN Underscored are some examples which have declined massively in Google’s Search Results ranking.

But these affected sites are still showing up in AI Overviews and I guess this will stop once caches clear. So hopefully soon these parasite SEO sites would be gone from AI Overviews too. I’m SUPER HAPPY TONIGHT YAAY because for last almost 4 years I’ve been working with small to medium size publishers – consulting them for SEO and its always just sad to see their helpful content not show up at top of search results meanwhile literally anything & everything from Forbes showing up.

But FINALLY its getting hammered by Google now. But at the same time I would like to see Google hammering all the sites which are abusing their site reputation and hosting parasite content.

Also I posted this video on Youtube explaining what’s going on with this Site Reputation Abuse policy change.