Google has updated its site reputation abuse policy to no longer say that first-party involvement or oversight of content is excluded from this policy when those sites use third-party content to exploit its search rankings. The site reputation abuse policy was announced as part of its large March 2024 core update several months ago.
“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,” Chris Nelson on behalf of the Google Search Quality team wrote.
Updated policy. Google has updated its site reputation abuse policy, which is located over here, to now say:
“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.”
Why the change. Google said since launching the policy, they have reviewed situations “varying degrees of first-party involvement, such as cooperation with white label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements.” Google added that based on its “numerous cases” it determined 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’ve heard very clearly from users that site reputation abuse – commonly referred to as “parasite SEO” – leads to a bad search experience for people, and today’s policy update helps to crack down on this behavior. Site owners that are found to be violating this policy will be notified in their Search Console account,” Chris Nelson, Google Search Quality told Search Engine Land.
Enforcement. This site reputation abuse policy is still enforced using manual actions, it is not yet algorithmic. Google said, “Site owners who receive a spam manual action will be notified through their registered Search Console account and can submit a reconsideration request.”
Google had to clarify this when the search company first began enforcement of this policy.