Google's Site Reputation Abuse Policy Still Enforced Manually

The site reputation abuse policy is aimed at preventing third-party pages from being published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement. These pages are intended to manipulate Search rankings by leveraging the first-party site's ranking signals. This includes sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose and provide little to no value to users.

As of now, Google is enforcing the site reputation abuse policy through manual actions only. Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, confirmed that the algorithmic component for enforcing this policy is not live yet. When Google does start using algorithmic actions, they will announce it clearly, likely on the search status page.

Danny Sullivan stated that Google has not gone live with algorithmic actions on site reputation abuse. He emphasized that when they do, they will be very clear about it. Sullivan also mentioned that the current manual actions impact only the content being acted upon, not the entire site.

Some SEOs believe the site reputation abuse policy is algorithmic now due to changes they have observed in search results. However, Danny Sullivan clarified that these changes are not related to the site reputation abuse policy, which is still enforced manually. He noted that search results change for various reasons and that the algorithmic component is not live yet.

There has been a lot of confusion around the ranking volatility over the past few weeks. This is partly due to several unconfirmed Google updates that have shuffled the search results. Danny Sullivan reiterated that the site reputation abuse policy's algorithmic component has not been rolled out yet, and the current changes are not related to it.