Google's 'Site Reputation Abuse' Update Rolls Out Today: What You Need to Know

Google's site reputation abuse update is a specific spam policy that targets sites hosting third-party content with little to no first-party oversight or involvement, aimed at manipulating Search rankings by leveraging the host site's ranking signals. This includes pages like 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 site reputation abuse update aims to prevent practices where marketers piggyback their content on another website to rank in search engines, often with little oversight from the host site. This includes the strategy known as 'parasite SEO,' where third-party pages are published on a host site to take advantage of its ranking signals, despite the content being largely unrelated to the host site's main purpose and providing little value to users.

Google's site reputation abuse policy enforcement began on Monday, May 6th, with the enforcement 'really kicking off' the following day, as confirmed by Google's SearchLiaison.

Some major brands are removing sections of their sites featuring product reviews because these reviews lack evidence that the reviewer actually handled the reviewed products. The removed reviews typically lacked original product photos, product measurements, and testing results, which could be perceived as hosting third-party content for the purpose of ranking in search engines, thus falling under the site reputation abuse policy.

Google's guidelines on site reputation abuse can be found by reading Google’s official guidelines, which detail what constitutes site reputation abuse and the practices that the policy aims to prevent.