Kevin Purdy – Nov 20, 2024
"Updating our site reputation abuse policy" is how Google, in almost wondrously opaque fashion, announced yesterday that big changes have come to some big websites, especially those that rely on their domain authority to promote lucrative third-party product recommendations.
If you've searched for reviews and seen results that make you ask why so many old-fashioned news sites seem to be "reviewing" products lately—especially products outside that site's expertise—that's what Google is targeting.
"This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host's already-established ranking signals," Google's post on its Search Central blog reads. "The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users."
Search firm Sistrix cited the lost traffic to the third-party review content inside Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune, and Time as worth $7.5 million last week, according to AdWeek. Search rankings dropped by up to 97 percent at Time's affiliate review site, Time Stamped, and 43 percent at Forbes Advisor. The drops are isolated to the affiliate subdomains of the sites, so their news-minded primary URLs still rank where relevant.
Trusted names in CBD gummies and pet insurance
The "site reputation abuse" Google is targeting takes many forms, but it has one common theme: using an established site's domain history to quietly sell things. Forbes, a well-established business news site, has an ownership stake in Forbes Marketplace (named Forbes Advisor in site copy) but does not fully own it.Under the strength of Forbes' long-existing and well-linked site, Forbes Marketplace/Advisor has dominated the search term "best cbd gummies" for "an eternity," according to SEO analyst Lily Ray. Forbes has similarly dominated "best pet insurance," and long came up as the second result for "how to get rid of roaches," as detailed in a blog post by Lars Lofgren. If people click on this high-ranking result, and then click on a link to buy a product or request a roach removal consultation, Forbes typically gets a cut.
Forbes Marketplace had seemingly also provided SEO-minded review services to CNN and USA Today, as detailed by Lofgren. Lofgren's term for this business, "Parasite SEO," took hold in corners critical of the trend. Ars has contacted Forbes for comment and will update this post with response.
“The unfair, exploitative nature” of “parasite SEO”
Google writes that it had reviewed "situations where there might be varying degrees of first-party involvement" (most publishers' review sites indicate some kind of oversight or editorial standards linked to the primary site). But however arranged, "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 sites' ranking signals."As such, using third-party content in such a way as to take advantage of a high search quality ranking, outside the site's primary focus, is considered spam. That delivers a major hit to a site's Google ranking, and the impact is already being felt.
The SEO reordering does not affect more established kinds of third-party content, like wire service reports, syndication, or well-marked sponsored content, as detailed in Google's spam policy section about site reputation abuse. As seen on the SEO subreddit, and on social media, Google has given sites running afoul of its updated policy a "Manual Action" rather than relying only on its algorithm to catch the often opaque arrangements.
