Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Earlier this year, as part of our work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience, we launched a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse. This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host's already-established ranking signals. The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users.
Since launching the policy, we've reviewed situations where there might be varying degrees of first-party involvement, such as cooperation with white-label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements. Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host's sites ranking signals.
We're clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior. We're making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site's ranking signals is a violation of this policy — regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content. Our updated policy language, effective today, is:
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.
When evaluating for policy violations, we take into account many different considerations (and we don't simply take a site's claims about how the content was produced at face value) to determine if third-party content is being used in an abusive way. Site owners who receive a spam manual action will be notified through their registered Search Console account and can submit a reconsideration request.
It's important to note that not all third-party content violates this policy. We go into detail on our spam policies page about what is and isn't site reputation abuse.
Aside from site reputation abuse issues, we also have systems and methods designed to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. By treating these areas as if they are standalone sites, it better ensures a level playing field, so that sub-sections of sites don't get a ranking boost just because of the reputation of the main site. As we continue to work to improve these systems, this helps us deliver the most useful information from a range of sites.
Our efforts to understand differences in sections of sites can lead to traffic changes if sub-sections no longer benefit from site-wide signals. This doesn't mean that these sub-sections have somehow been demoted or are in violation of our spam policies. It means we're measuring them independently, even if they are located within a site.
This clarification to our site reputation abuse policy will help surface the most useful search results, combat manipulative practices, and ensure that all sites have an equal opportunity to rank based on the quality of their content. We encourage site owners to familiarize themselves with this updated policy and focus on building high-quality websites that prioritize content created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings.