2 days Ago By Kamya Pandey
Explainer Briefly Slides Google is updating the language of its site reputation abuse policy to target spam on Search. As per Google’s new definition of site reputation abuse, it is a practice where people publish “third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.” In simple terms, it is when a third party (‘A’ for example) sees that another website (‘B’) has built up a good reputation and ranks well on Google Search.
Party A then puts its content on Site B to benefit from B’s good reputation. By posting their content on reputed sites, third parties can confuse or mislead site visitors who may have different content expectations from said sites. Google first came out with a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse in March this year .
At the time its site reputation abuse policy said if a third party hosts content on a reputed website with little or no first-party oversight or involvement to manipulate search rankings, it would be considered violative. Violative content would rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. “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,” the company says in its November 19 blog post announcing the updated language of the policy.
Google’s evaluation shows that no matter how involved the original site is, it doesn’t alter the nature of the third-party content it hosts “or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host’s sites ranking signals”. So what changes with the new updated language? As per the updated language, if third parties host content on a reputed site — regardless of whether the host site was involved in screening the content or not—is a violation of Google’s spam policies. Google emphasises that it doesn’t just take a website’s perspective about reputation abuse at face value, but rather determines violations based on a range of considerations.
It adds that not everything that a third party posts on a reputed site is a violation. Non-violative third-party content includes: On the other hand, content that violates the policy includes a medical site hosting a page about casinos or a sports site hosting a page about workout supplements. In such cases, if the host site wants to avoid a low or no Google search ranking, it must exclude that content from Search indexing.
Other kinds of spam that violate Google’s policies: Besides reputation abuse, Google considers a range of other practices ‘spam’. This includes: Earlier in August, Google Search rolled out updates to restrict fake content to lower rankings. Through this measure, Google aimed to provide high-quality, non-explicit content for queries related to the fake content.
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