The News Media Alliance, a trade association representing over 2,200 publishers, sent the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission an open letter last week urging the organizations to investigate an algorithm update issued by Google earlier this year.
This update, which amended Google’s Site Reputation Abuse (SRA) policy, has upended the affiliate businesses of major news publishers across the industry.
The policy forbids publishers from working with third-party vendors to create affiliate content, such as product reviews. Publishers found by Google to be in violation of the new policy are penalized by being demoted in search visibility, leading to declines in traffic and revenue.
However, according to the NMA and several publishers who spoke with ADWEEK, Google doesn’t have appropriate transparency around violations and how to rectify them.
“Under this new policy, all partnerships where media companies publish third party content or affiliate links, regardless of editorial control and oversight, have the potential to risk Google manually removing content from ranking in search results,” NMA chief executive Danielle Coffey wrote in the letter.
“Once this occurs, even in error, ” she continued, “it can take Google weeks to months to remove manual actions applied against a site and return the website to its proper position in search results.”
In recent months, at least a dozen publishers have seen traffic to their affiliate businesses plummet, throttling their ability to convert shoppers and generate revenue. But at least five affected publishers say that the update, while well-intentioned, has devolved into a kafkaesque nightmare—one that has cost them millions in unrealized revenue and expended resources.
Four publishers said they should not have been penalized—that they are in full compliance with the new policy and were mistakenly punished. A fifth admitted to violating the updated guidelines. But both groups say that the process of appealing and reversing the penalties is frustratingly opaque, leaving publishers to guess blindly at what they need to do to lift their bans.
“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 an uneven playing field for content creators, and many users and website owners have applauded this update,” a Google spokesperson shared in a statement.