Google's Site Reputation Abuse, Expanded Beyond Automated Content

Here's how Google's Site Reputation Abuse penalty has been developing over the year now and what to expect!

For a year now, Google has been struggling with one issue born out of its own algorithm deficiency, i.e. site authority.

For those unaware, the site authority is almost exclusively relying on its aggregated backlink profile, external backlinks pointing to its all pages.

The thing is, those claiming links are no longer important, cannot explain one tricky phenomenon, once a domain with many strong backlinks publishes a new page, it miraculously starts ranking in Google with no additional effort.

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That happens because the collective power of backlinks pointing to that domain tells Google to treat this new page as an authoritative one.

And the power of that signal is so strong that Google is struggling to bypass it in any other way than manually picking the sites abusing this signal and telling them to stop.

This is where the site reputation abuse penalty comes into play: Google is manually picking strong domains that host (irrelevant*) third-party content that ranks too well, again, thanks to the site's reputation.

It started with Google going after high-authority domains hosting automated content (coupons and deals collected via APIs) and penalizing that section by sending manual notifications and deindexing it.

This happened about a year ago for the first time. And at that point, Google told everyone that hosting automated content with little or no editorial oversight and generating organic search traffic by relying on the host site’s authority is, basically, an abuse.

A lot of jobs were lost over that new development because some of those penalized sites did in fact have editors overseeing that third-party content.

This year Google has expanded site reputation abuse policies to confuse everyone even more. From this point on:

• It doesn’t matter whether there is any editorial oversight of third-party content or not. It is still abuse.

• The content doesn’t have to be automated. Third-party content now includes content created by freelancers or outside contributors. We had seen this interesting phenomenon before Google made it official. A few publications

The only thing that matters is whether that third-party content was created to abuse Google’s algorithm.

Is it just me or is this an absolutely nonsense of a definition?

You can’t just call anything an abuse. It is not an abuse. It’s your algorithm deficiency. Fix it instead of looking for outside offenders.

At this point, anything can be regarded as abuse or manipulation because any site out there is doing its best to rank.

But rants aside, there’s one interesting update in another Google’s document talking about new reputation abuse rules. Google can algorithmically detect a section of the site that is “starkly different from the main content of the site.”

So it’s all about relevance

Gone are the days when you could create a site about anything, it seems. Google wants to know your niche and will judge you for changing it.

This is also a good first sign that Google is planning to make site reputation abuse action part of the algorithm, and that’s when it will go wrong (there is always a ton of collateral damage when Google introduces algorithmic changes that contradict its core signals, i.e. backlinks and site authority. We’ve seen this happen with helpful content systems.).

So if you have high-ranking pages (that bring income) but are not relevant to your site, be prepared. You are likely to lose those rankings in the future. So start planning accordingly now.

One thing that this one-year development shows us, marketers, is that the backlink profile is key. And moreover, it is fundamental. So if you want to worry less about new policies and updates, reach out. We know how to build strong backlinks.