Google has updated its documentation to provide clearer guidance on its site reputation abuse policy.
The changes are meant to you better understand what qualifies as a violation and how to stay compliant.
While the updates don’t change how the policy is applied, they make the rules easier to follow by incorporating more detailed explanations from a recent blog post FAQ.
What Changed?
The updated documentation now includes content directly pulled from Google’s November blog post about site reputation abuse.
That blog post introduced a Q&A section to clarify the policy. Google has now added this FAQ guidance to its official spam policies documentation.
In a statement, Google explained:
“We updated the site reputation abuse policy to include guidance from our blog post’s FAQ on site reputation abuse. These are editorial changes only, no change in behavior.”
This means the policy hasn’t changed—it’s just been rewritten to make it easier to understand.
What Is Site Reputation Abuse?
Site reputation abuse happens when third-party content is published on a well-established website to take advantage of that site’s ranking signals.