After a loud chorus of complaints from site owners, Google is updating its policy on sites using their reputation to game the Search algorithm, the company said in a blog post Tuesday.
Site reputation abuse, sometimes referred to colloquially as “parasite SEO,” is the practice of using a larger website’s high ranking and domain authority in Google to elevate smaller sites by linking to them. For example, if you own a small clothing company and want a higher ranking in Search, you could pay a larger website to publish an article and have that site link to your clothing brand. The effect is that your site may get a boost in Google Search.
“We’ve heard very clearly from users that site reputation abuse … leads to a bad search experience for people, and today’s policy update helps to crack down on this behavior,” said Chris Nelson, a member of Google’s search quality team, in a statement. “Site owners that are found to be violating this policy will be notified in their Search Console account.”
This update in policy notes that despite how much a first-party site may be involved in third-party content published on its site, it’s ultimately unfair and exploits the search algorithm.
“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,” Nelson said in the blog post.
Spam content has long been a problem with online search and has only been exacerbated in recent years. There are plenty of Reddit threads and TikTok videos complaining about the quality of Google Search. For smaller sites, those trying to push through the noise and find clicks, parasite SEO has been a major annoyance. Site owners have been complaining of lower-quality sites usurping theirs because these sites are gaming the system.
The frustration lies in the current pay-per-click ad-based model online in which sites sell ads against website traffic. The more clicks a site can bring in, the more revenue it can generate with ad clicks. What happens is bad actors can create content farms, either with cheap labor or AI, to pump out web pages and pack them with ads. And if these lower quality sites are using parasite SEO to game the algorithm, those sites end up getting the ad revenue. Plus, readers may be left annoyed by clicking on an article that doesn’t necessarily answer their question.
A confluence of factors, including the rise of short-form video platforms like TikTok, the rapid adoption of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, a degradation in search quality, the prevalence of privacy-focused search engines plus competition from Bing and Yahoo, has led to Google seeing a small but consequential drop in market share. Over the past year, Google’s online search market share fell by 4%, according to GS Statcounter.
Apart from challenges regarding spam, Google’s also facing regulatory pressure, with a judge declaring the tech giant maintains a monopoly in online search and ads. And it’s looking like the US Department of Justice will recommend to a federal judge that Google sell its Chrome browser business.