Site owners who have violated the new Site Reputation Abuse policy will receive a spam manual action, which occurs when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google spam policies.
In similar but less flagrant cases, Google also has a series of systems designed to detect if a section of a site is “independent or starkly different from” the main content of the site. In those situations, the search platform will treat these site sub-sections as standalone sites, meaning they will not get a ranking boost just because of the reputation of the main site.
This latter method of enforcement will reduce the search visibility of these sub-sections, leading to a decline in traffic.
“This doesn’t mean that these sub-sections have somehow been demoted or are in violation of our spam policies,” the blog post notes. “It simply means we’re measuring them independently, even if they are located within a site.”
Reshaping the affiliate landscape
The policy revision comes one week after reporting from ADWEEK detailed a steep decline in the search visibility of the affiliate arms of several premium publishers.
Beginning in July, the search visibility of the Forbes, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune, and Time affiliate operations dropped sharply.
Between Sept. 12 and Oct. 31, search visibility declined 43% at Forbes Advisor, 77% at WSJ Buy-Side, 63% at CNN Underscored, 72% at Fortune Recommends, and 97% at Time Stamped, according to data compiled for ADWEEK by Sistrix.
Crucially, the declines were isolated only to the affiliate arms of these publishers, said Sistrix marketing manager Steve Paine. For example, CNN Underscored declined in search visibility, but CNN.com did not.
This pattern is highly atypical, according to Paine. It is rare to see such a small number of sites be affected by an SEO update, and it is rarer still to see site directories, rather than the domains themselves, experiencing isolated drop-offs.
Speaking with ADWEEK, several search analysts suspected that the drop-offs were related to these publishers violating the Site Reputation Abuse policy. All five publishers worked with third-party vendors to power—to varying degrees—their affiliate businesses.
In a statement provided to ADWEEK at the time, Google described the fundamental dynamic of Site Reputation Abuse without using the phrase specifically.
“We’re working to combat tactics where third parties try to exploit a site’s reputation just to rank well in search,” a Google spokesperson told ADWEEK. “We recently updated our spam policies to specifically target this type of behavior.”
The declines have led to material losses in revenue and traffic for the publishers.