However, one of their blog posts ranks in Position 4 for the search query “puppy after vaccination side effects,” above actual experts like the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The result in Position 1? It’s Rover.com, a technology company that helps pet owners find sitters – still not a medical expert, yet leveraging its strong domain.
I’m not suggesting that Progressive is engaging in anything nefarious here. This is likely just a one-time, off-topic post.
However, the larger issue is that Progressive could easily turn its Lifelines blog into a parasite SEO program if it wanted to.
With minimal effort, it’s ranking for a medical query – an area where E-E-A-T is meant to make competition tougher.
The only way to stop this right now is for Google to spot it and enforce the site reputation abuse policy, but that could take years.
At best, the policy serves as a short-term fix and a warning to other sites attempting abuse.
However, it can’t address the broader problem of large, authoritative sites consistently outperforming true experts.
What’s going on with Google’s algorithms?
The site reputation abuse policy is a temporary band-aid for a much larger systemic issue plaguing Google.
Algorithmically, Google should be better equipped to rank true experts in a given field and filter out sites that aren’t topical authorities.
One of the biggest theories is the increased weight Google places on brand authority.
The winners of the helpful content update were more likely to have stronger “brand authority” than “domain authority,” according to a recent Moz study.
Essentially, the more brand searches a site receives, the more likely it is to emerge as a winner in recent updates.
This makes sense, as Google aims to rank major brands (e.g., “Nike” for “sneakers”) for their respective queries.
However, big brands like Forbes, CNN, Wall Street Journal and Progressive also receive a lot of brand search.
If Google places too much weight on this signal, it creates opportunities for large sites to either intentionally exploit or unintentionally benefit from the power of their domain or brand search.
This system doesn’t reward true expertise in a specific area.
Right now, the site reputation abuse policy is the only tool Google has to address these issues when their algorithm fails.
While there’s no easy fix, it seems logical to focus more on the topical authority aspect of their algorithm moving forward.
When we look at the Google Search API leaks, we can see that Google could use different variables to determine a site’s topical expertise.
For instance, the “siteEmbedding” variable implies they can categorize your whole site.
One that stands out to me is the “siteFocusScore” variable.
It’s a “number denoting how much a site is focused on one topic,” according to the leaks.
If sites begin to dilute their focus too much, could this be a trigger indicating something larger is at play?
Moving forward
I don’t think the site reputation abuse policy is a bad thing.
At the very least, it serves as a much-needed warning to the web, with the threat of significant consequences potentially deterring the most egregious abuses.
However, in the short term, it feels like Google is admitting that there’s no programmatic solution to the problem.
Since the issue can’t be detected algorithmically, it needs a way to threaten action when necessary.
That said, I’m optimistic that Google will figure this out in the long run and that search quality will improve in the years to come.
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