After nearly a full year where SEO twitter collectively lost their minds at Google over the rampant abuse of authority for affiliate profit by large publishers, and the third party organizations that are often pulling the strings behind the scenes, the site reputation abuse policy was announced back in early March, 2024.
Unlike any other action taken in search engine history though, big daddy Google actually gave everyone a heads up! You had two months (Until Monday, May 5th) to clean up the abusing content, or face the anti-spam team’s wrath… Which consisted of deindexing the offending subfolders or subdomains, and leaving the rest of the site’s search positions intact.
What is The Site Reputation Abuse Policy?
The original policy was meant to stop large, authority websites from abusing their domain’s power and strength to rank content pieces they didn’t create in an effort to earn affiliate commissions. Essentially, it was released in an effort to stop these sites from “hosting” third-party content purely for profit, and often “stealing” those spots from small, independent publishers or niche-specific sites that have earned their trust in the space.
The technique this is meant to stop is often referred to as “Parasite” or “Barnacle” SEO.
Caption: Glenn Gabe’s infamous post on Google coming after these types of sites, which turned out to all be manual actions after all, and nothing algorithmic.
The original policy was meant to have a combination of both manual penalties issued by Google’s anti-spam engineers, and an algorithmic component that would stop sites from straying into monetizable topics that are out of the norm for their site.
The algorithmic component was delayed, potentially indefinitely. We have seen limited actions taken in the SERPs to drop a lot of this style of content, but it could also be manual tags or even inputting pages into the training for algorithmic classifiers as negative examples – We just aren’t sure yet, but the algorithm is often still rewarding this content, and in international keywords we have only seen it become more powerful, which leads us to believe the algorithmic component was never released, at least outside of English markets.
A perfect example of this was Forbes Advisor (ran by the third-party company, Marketplace) where Google manually penalized the subfolder it was running on, only for them to change subfolders and immediately rebound almost all of their lost rankings in a matter of days –
Forbes Advisor simply switched subfolders after getting hit with a Google manual penalty and are getting almost instant traffic worth millions of dollars per month back…
It’s the same content too! See how powerful Parasite SEO is?
This was an inevitably though! And something… https://t.co/wmyvse0YHV pic.twitter.com/C7dRZOr13D
— Charles Floate 📈 (@Charles_SEO) November 22, 2024
Embarrassing for Google, and even more embarrassing considering the only reason it stopped working was because the Forbes inhouse SEO team removed the pages themselves –
Forbes Advisor (Marketplace) have deleted the new subfolder content and 404’d the pages, which are now tanking in the SERPs – More manual actions, the algorithm didn’t do anything again…
Who will be the next big publisher to earn 9-figures in parasite SEO partnerships? 🤭 https://t.co/SoGOb48pij pic.twitter.com/6RxCWarTTG
— Charles Floate 📈 (@Charles_SEO) November 23, 2024
And even if Google has finally slapped this one example, they are already walking away with well over $100 MILLION in profits, and the third-party company behind it has other partnerships they’re doing the exact same thing with anyway.
What Changed in November?
Google made a major announcement on the 19th of November, where they updated the policy to no longer be ONLY third-party content, but that ANY involvement, including ownership or oversight of the content can now lead to a manual penalty.
This was an especially important update, considering that third-party company behind Forbes Advisor was actually trying to buy the entire Forbes brand earlier this year.
Why Does This Work So Well?
Remember the old saying, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”?
That especially rings true here.
You can’t blame the publishers, the third-parties, the affiliate programs, the writers or even the investors powering all of this content in the first place! You can only blame the ultimate arbiters of the game: Google.
Google got us to this point by making years of sustained algorithm changes that pushed to a more centralized ecosystem, with fewer voices than ever before.
The only consistent factor that we could routinely see going up as a direct ranking signal inside Google search was authority, and I’m not talking about your a professor on a topic authority, I’m talking about that sweet, sweet link juice.
What Can We Learn?
There are a lot of takeaways, but here are the main three points that we should be picking up on:
- Google’s Retrospective Play –
For years, Google has incentivized this type of centralization. They’ve rewarded authority sites by ranking them higher even when their content isn’t better. This created an environment where third-party players (parasites) exploited these cracks, utilizing the domain strength of big publishers like Forbes to dominate SERPs in spaces they didn’t traditionally have authority in. Now, Google seems to want to clean up the mess they helped create but only on a manual level, and in English. - Shifting Goalposts for “Authority” –
With the updated Site Reputation Abuse Policy, even authority sites can no longer safely host third-party content under their umbrellas. If the site or its overseers have any hand in creating or promoting this content, it could lead to manual penalties. This undermines years of trust built into high-DR (Domain Rating) platforms and pushes publishers to rethink their entire affiliate content strategies, and even acquisitions. - Algorithmic Uncertainty –
Google’s reliance on manual actions (deindexing subfolders and slapping warnings) rather than full-scale algo rollouts may reflect either a technical limitation, internal politics or strategic hesitation. The fact that international markets still thrive on this loophole is telling of where the priorities (or capabilities) lie though.
Takeaways:
- If you’re pumping parasite pages in English, be careful with which sites you’re choosing from now on, keep constantly updated and always look for new sites – Or let our tool do that for you!
- While this policy tightens the reins slightly, it certainly doesn’t eliminate the Parasite SEO strategy entirely. SEOs can still find success by being selective in partnerships, focusing on underutilized platforms, and adapting content to new niches.
- Build relationships where you don’t have to disclose the third-party nature.
- These changes don’t seem to affect local SEO at all, and in fact, if any algorithmic components are added, it should make it stronger – You can use this tutorial on how to do your own local parasite SEO pages.
And most importantly: adapt fast. This policy is just another reminder that Google can and will move the goalposts whenever it feels like it. Control as many variables of your SEO strategy as you can to avoid future rugpulls from any number of opponents.