Google’s SearchLiaison affirmed the commencement of Google’s site reputation abuse update on Monday, May 6th. Several websites across the internet removed webpages that might be interpreted as hosting third-party content to manipulate search engine rankings.
A strategy involves marketers leveraging their content on another website to boost its search engine ranking. This practice, often described as a publisher piggybacking on another publisher’s website, has recently regained traction.
Some inexperienced marketers have dubbed this strategy “parasite SEO.” However, this term is ill-suited as parasites typically rely on unwilling host organisms, whereas this approach to ranking operates through mutual agreement, not predatory behavior.
Far from being solely used by low-level affiliate marketers, this tactic is also embraced by numerous major brands, especially in industries such as credit cards and product reviews.
The Google Cracks Down on Third-Party Content
This particular spam policy focuses on websites that host third-party content without much involvement from the hosting publisher in the content published on their site. However, merely hosting third-party content is not the sole criterion for being targeted as spam.
Google’s formal definition is:
“Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users.”
In a tweet, Google’s SearchLiaison confirmed that the policy took effect today.
The tweet read:
“It’ll be starting later today. While the policy began yesterday, the enforcement is really kicking off today.”
Recently, several prominent brand websites have eliminated sections featuring product reviews that lacked evidence of reviewers actually interacting with the products they reviewed. These reviews lacked original product photos, lacked product measurements, and lacked testing results.
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