Google Starts Rolling out Site Reputation Abuse Update With Manual Actions
Google is cracking down on “parasite SEO,” a form of affiliate marketing where low-quality content is mixed in with content on another website in order to take advantage of the host site’s higher ranking in search engines.
Earlier in March, search engine giant Google started rolling out its first major core update for the year. The company also announced that it would release the site reputation abuse update in May. Accordingly, Google’s SearchLiaison confirmed that the search engine giant started its site reputation abuse update this Monday (May 6).
The update has started with manual actions, which will soon be followed by algorithmic actions. As part of this update, many websites took down pages that may be considered as hosting third-party content purely to rank it high on search engines. Manual actions are when the Google staff personally reviews websites to decide if they should undergo a manual action, generally meaning removing them from the search index. Algorithmic actions are those when Google uses algorithms for the same ultimate goal.
See more: SEO Shakeup: Analyzing Google’s March 2024 Core Update and Its Impact
Site Reputation Abuse
This practice is an old strategy that has reemerged in recent years. In this strategy, marketers piggyback their content on another website to rank higher on search engines. It is basically like a publisher piggybacking on another publisher’s website. A few marketers also call this practice “parasite SEO.” However, this is not a simple affiliate marketing strategy. It is also something that is practiced by several major brands, especially for product reviews and credit cards.
This specific Google policy targets websites that host third-party content, where the host publisher probably has nothing to do with the hosted content. That being said, just hosting third-party content cannot be considered spam or site reputation abuse.
Google defines site reputation abuse as follows:
“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.”
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