Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy: What It Is and How to Avoid It
What’s the best way to get your company or brand’s name out there? The answer is digital marketing, including building a website, creating high-quality and useful content, and advertising on social media. But creating a website alone will not bring you all the customers you need. You must also have a strong SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, which helps companies rank on search engines and attract organic traffic to their websites.
Knowing the rules of the road when it comes to SEO is crucial. With SEO being an ever-changing landscape, it can feel like walking a tightrope. Take one wrong step and you could see your website drop off the map in terms of traffic and rankings.
That’s because of Google’s recent policy change that is demoting content when it’s drastically different from the main content of a site. Google calls it site reputation abuse, and it can hurt a site’s rankings greatly. The good news is, SharpNet Solutions is an established digital marketing agency that can help you avoid having your content be affected by Google’s site reputation abuse policy, and instead have your rankings grow over time thanks to our SEO expertise and content marketing specialists.
Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy Enforcement
In May 2024, Google rolled out a new site reputation abuse policy. Simply, when one successful website is attracting a lot of traffic, another site will piggyback along in order for it to rank on Google. For instance, a sports news website with high traffic could host a page on “best casino games” simply to help the third-party site rank on search engines.
Here’s Google’s formal definition of the policy:
“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.”
The New Policy Went Into Effect in May, but Only Manually
Originally announced in March 2024, Google gave businesses two months to fix their pages ahead of their site reputation abuse policy going into effect before Google began de-ranking or even de-indexing them. Sites with third-party affiliate subdomains were being found and manually dropped in the rankings.
Algorhythmically, It Will Come Soon, But Not Yet
The goal wasn’t to de-rank sites manually, because that would seemingly take forever, with millions of sites on the world wide web. Their goal was to use algorithms to systematically de-rank sites, and Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive thought he found evidence of just that. Gabe displayed images of traffic reporting showing steep declines in websites’ visibility index and organic traffic numbers in an October 2024 article, “A Nightmare on Affiliate Street.” Those sites included major brands like Forbes Advisor, APNews Buyline, and TIME Stamped. These are all e-commerce sites backed by major brands Forbes, APNews, and TIME.
Google told Gabe they still aren’t testing the algorithm for site reputation abuse and, “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.”
“With SEO being an ever-changing landscape, it can feel like walking a tightrope.”
Why Did Sites Have Their Google Search Visibility Drop?
What it sounds like is that Google manually dropped those particular sites’ visibilities, respectively. Because what they want from their top SERPs (search engine results pages) is the best, most relevant, and therefore useful information for users.
Yes, Forbes is considered one of the most reputable sources for business news. So, for example, if someone is looking for news on the Google antitrust lawsuit, they could likely find it there. And the search engine would likely promote it as one of the top-ranking results. But now, Forbes Advisor—complete with rankings of credit cards, car insurance, and more—makes it look like an affiliate page is trying to sell something unrelated to Forbes.
If a user searches for “personal loans 2024,” it looks like Forbes Advisor is “selling” SoFi as the best loan option. And since Forbes Advisor is connected to Forbes’ main site—with well-researched and well-written journalism—the main site will suffer in terms of traffic, too. Because, if your pages aren’t showing up on the first page of Google searches, people will have a difficult time finding them.
How to Ensure Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy Doesn’t Affect Your Site
The simplest way to ensure your website doesn’t get hampered by Google’s site reputation abuse policy is to not try to game the system by avoiding letting irrelevant third-party content on your site or, inversely, stop paying to have your own unrelated content posted on high reputation sites. Just like there are black hat SEO practices—like hiding text or keyword stuffing—using a third-party site to boost your main site’s visibility will likely backfire.
Simply, great content is crucial for the best SEO results. It has to be well-written, it needs to be strategically optimized, and users should be able to learn something from it. Google ranks based on E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and only the best content can give users what they want and need.
Contact SharpNet Solutions for Digital Marketing Results
With more than 25 years of experience, growth, and adaptability, SharpNet Solutions can deliver the results your business needs. You’ll never have to worry about Google’s site reputation abuse policy, because we’re paying attention to the latest trends and best practices. Our SEO and content marketing experts consistently deliver results for web pages, new websites, and long-form blogs for all types and sizes of businesses. Contact us today to learn how we can help your website gain traction, increase traffic, and rank well in search results.