Google has dealt a blow to many news publishers making revenue via paid-for affiliate links by downgrading these parts of their websites in search results.
Major newsbrands including Forbes, AP News, CNN, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal are among those that have been hit by Google’s “site reputation abuse” update.
News sites paid to host special offer coupons by third parties are among those affected – but so are many which create content themselves aimed at making commission revenue from clicks through to e-commerce sites.
The tech giant said breaches of its new rules included a sports site hosting a page about “workout supplement reviews” written by a third-party, or a movie review site writing about unrelated topics like the “best essay writing services”.
SEO experts believe the crackdown was being carried out manually by Google staff rather than via the rollout of an algorithm update.
Online marketer and SEO expert Charles Taylor said: “How do I know there are manual penalties? Because you can go in the charts and you can see big drops…personally, I think Google is really out of line to start telling people how they can and cannot monetise their website.”
In March Google announced it would begin a crackdown on site reputation abuse, which it defined as being “when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals.
“Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users.”
Google continued: “Our new policy doesn’t consider all third-party content to be a violation, only that which is hosted without close oversight and which is intended to manipulate Search rankings. For example, many publications host advertising content that is intended for their regular readers, rather than to primarily manipulate Search rankings,” Google said, adding that this may include native advertising content.
This initial update “effectively turned off a very significant revenue stream for a lot of publishers” that shared voucher codes and betting offers with their readers, Carly Steven, Mail Online’s global head of SEO, told a Press Gazette event in September.
However, in November many publishers were blindsided by a change to the policy that now means sites will be penalised “regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content”.
This means that even if a publisher is employing the staff writing affiliate content on a subdomain, it can still be hit if Google considers it to be piggybacking on the main newsbrand’s high reputation.
Google said it had evaluated various cases and decided “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”.
A Google spokesperson told Press Gazette: “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 this policy update helps to crack down on this behaviour. Site owners that are found to be violating this policy will be notified in their Search Console account.”
Taylor told Press Gazette: “I kind of feel like they just pulled the rug out from everybody…” He and other SEO experts also shared concerns about the timing of the manual actions, coming just days before the key affiliate marketing dates of Black Friday and Cyber Monday without time to pivot to a different monetisation strategy.
Google site reputation abuse update means publishers ‘can’t take easy way out’
Publisher affiliate sections affected, as cited by Taylor and other SEO experts, include Forbes Advisor, CNN Underscored, USA Today’s Reviewed, US News 360 Reviews, The Sun’s Shopping and WSJ Buy Side.
These sections are all run on a subfolder of the main news website (for example forbes.com/advisor) making it easy for Google to penalise that section but not the whole site. They are also generally run by a separate team: for example, CNN Underscored features a prominent disclaimer: “Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN newsroom.”
Taylor said: “It’s tough, because this was a major revenue source for news sites and Google’s basically come and said they don’t like that, they don’t want that.”
He added: “I don’t think this means that publishers can’t do affiliate revenue. I think it means they can’t take the easy way out, meaning you can’t just partner with some company and have them throw content on your site, because that’s really what Google didn’t like. They didn’t like the fact that people were essentially renting out their sites to other companies. If you’re a news company and you want to have affiliate revenue, Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, but it’s going to have to be part of your already existing content.”
Taylor also said publishing affiliate content would pose a “risk versus the reward” question. “What’s the risk of putting coupons.pressgazette.com up on your website? Maybe Google will find it, maybe Google won’t find it. Maybe you can get away with it for four to six months before Google drops the hammer on you.”
SEO expert Shane Dutka summarised the issue to Press Gazette as this: “Google doesn’t want you to use the domain for a purpose it wasn’t built for. Forbes wasn’t built to talk about pet insurance, US News wasn’t built to talk about VPN software. Build sites dedicated to those verticals, and you will find success if Google wants to reward those sites.”
He advised publishers to move away from the content being penalised by Google. “Obviously, it was nice where it lasted. Take that cash, reinvest it into the core business,” he suggested.
“Potentially start a new business targeting these verticals that you’ve made so much money from with your main site but create a site dedicated for it, so that it adheres to the policy.”
Belfast-based SEO for news expert Barry Adams told Press Gazette the scale of the manual penalties being implemented by Google are “astounding”.
“Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of publisher websites have been penalised for breaching Google’s reinterpreted site reputation abuse spam policy. It’s similar in scale to the mass penalties we saw Google handing out back in May, when the original site reputation abuse policy went into effect and hundreds of voucher codes sections and subdomains were penalised. And that was a rare event.
“For the last decade or so, Google has preferred to find algorithmic solutions to what it perceives as spam and content quality challenges. Handing out manual penalties on this scale, twice in one year, to me reads as an admission of defeat. Google is unable to find the right algorithmic formula so it resorts to manual penalties.”
Google update ‘hasn’t made search results any better’
Adams added that he had “mixed feelings” about the penalties and their impact on some publishers.
“Some of the affected sites seemed destined to receive a penalty at some stage, as their commercial content was in obvious breach of Google’s spam policies. These sites partnered with third party providers, often leasing out an entire section of their website (subfolder or subdomain) which the third-party then filled with cheaply produced content aimed at generating clicks on affiliate links and earning commissions. The web is better off with this type of content removed from Google’s search results.
“However, some of the content I’ve seen Google handing out site reputation abuse penalties for is not technically in violation of the site reputation abuse policy. This content is not from a third party. It is produced in-house by directly employed writers, often based on their own experiences with the products they’re writing about. Yet Google has still decided to penalise this content, because it might have some attributes in common with the third-party content Google wants rid of.
“These common attributes are primarily that the content is monetised with affiliate links rather than advertising, so Google can’t make money from it directly.”
Changes have made Google search results worse in many cases
Adams also pointed out that the top Google search results for many commerce queries “have drastically changed, and often not for the better” since the penalties were put into place.
“Rather than affiliate content that’s professionally written and vetted by a publisher, many search results are now dominated by absolutely awful content that’s mass produced and likely AI generated. It hasn’t made Google search any better.
“These facts – Google overreaching and penalising content that isn’t actually in violation of the policies, the conspicuous timing of these penalties right before the busiest annual e-commerce period, and the resulting degradation of organic rankings – throw a huge shadow over these latest Google shenanigans. To me it reeks of desperation, and not the actions of a search engine fully in control of its platform and its market.”
Content strategist Deborah Carver also told Press Gazette it made “very little sense” to her that Google would be “okay with outright marketing websites but not media websites using affiliate marketing”. She suggested the policy had been implemented “in response to a few very loud people”.
Carver noted that it makes sense for publishers to build content that is easier to monetise alongside their news output, for which it is more difficult.
“All these places that are monetising a little more creatively, they are now not allowed to because Google has deemed them to be abusing their brand reputation, and my argument is very much that they’re not,” she said. “They’re acting as publishers who create content professionally, and they are not abusing their reputation.”
Giving a counter view, Robi Buckley, co-founder and chief technology officer of UK-based independent sports and entertainment publisher GRV Media, said: “It’s definitely been a case of one rule for them, another for everyone else, which has caused a lot of frustration amongst the SEO and publishing community. Especially when you consider a lot of this parasite content was created in partnership with third-party entities in order to maximise profits with little effort from the publications themselves (reviews of products without actually reviewing them for example).
“I think a lot of publishers and SEOs were pleasantly surprised to see Google finally act and start to penalise these sites, just a day after they updated their site reputation abuse policy to also include third-party content even if it includes first-party involvement or content oversight.
“It will be interesting to see how these publications respond and for how long these manual actions remain in place. But it has to be a step in the right direction with regards to ensuring consumers are given the best possible search results rather than content created at volume purely to line the pockets of media giants.”
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