Google updated their spam documentation, adding a new definition of site reputation abuse as the largest single change, followed by additional information about manual action consequences. The remaining updates are a content refresh aimed at making the documentation easier to understand and more concise. Understanding these changes can provide ideas for how to update your own content effectively.
What Changed
There are about eight kinds of changes made to the documentation that improves the content. That’s seven ways that older content can be made fresher.
These are the types of changes made:
More Information About Site Reputation Abuse
New Details About Manual Action Consequences
Changed Concept Of Thin Affiliate To Thin Affiliation
More Appropriate Introductory Sentence
Consolidation Of Words: Practices & Spam Practices
Added The Concept Of Spam Abuse
Improved Conciseness In General
Improved Topic: Machine-Generated Traffic
More Information About Site Reputation Abuse
The previous documentation advises that site reputation abuse is when a third party publishes content on an authoritative site with “with little or no first-party oversight” but it didn’t explain what “first-party oversight” is so the new version of the spam documentation adds a new definition.
“Close oversight or involvement is when the first-party hosting site is directly producing or generating unique content (for example, via staff directly employed by the first-party, or freelancers working for staff of the first-party site). It is not working with third-party services (such as “white-label” or “turnkey”) that focus on redistributing content with the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.”
New Details About Manual Action Consequences
Google added a new sentence explaining that one of the consequences of continuing to violate Google’s spam guidelines is that they can escalate the consequences by removing more sections of a site from the search results. This isn’t a new consequence but it is new information.
This is the new detail in the context of a site that continues to spam:
“…and taking broader action in Google Search (for example, removing more sections of a site from Search results).”
This is an example of refreshing content by adding additional information that was left out of the original version.
Changed Concept Of Thin Affiliate To Thin Affiliation
Google changed the section about “Thin affiliate pages” so that it is now about “Thin affiliation” and added a definition of what they mean.
The original version about thin affiliate pages started like this:
“Thin affiliate pages are pages with product affiliate links…”
The new version starts like this:
“Thin affiliation is the practice of publishing content with product affiliate links…”
More Appropriate Introductory Sentence
Google’s documentation improved the introductory sentence by making it more appropriate for the context of the topic. It now defines what spam is. The new sentence doesn’t replace the the old introductory sentence, the old one simply becomes the second sentence.
Original introductory sentence:
“Our spam policies help protect users and improve the quality of search results.”
New introductory sentence:
“In the context of Google Search, spam is web content that’s designed to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems in order to rank highly. Our spam policies help protect users and improve the quality of search results.”
The new version starts with a definition of spam, which makes sense for documentation about spam.
Consolidation Of Words: Practices & Spam Practices
The following examples show how Google consolidated euphemisms for the same thing (spam) into a single phrase that emphasizes the phrase Spam Practices.
This change combines phrases like ‘content and behaviors’ and ‘forms of spam’ into the simpler phrases ‘practices” and ‘spam practices.’ I’m not sure why Google made this change, but using consistent terminology makes content easier to understand.
Here are some examples of the phrase “practices” and “spam practices” being emphasized:
1. The second paragraph is changed to make it more concise.
This:
“We detect policy-violating content and behaviors both through automated systems….”
Is now this:
“We detect policy-violating practices…”
The sentence becomes easier to understand. <— This is important.
2. Around the fourth paragraph:
This:
“Our policies cover common forms of spam, but Google may act against any type of spam we detect.”