Google continues to fine-tune its stance on site reputation abuse, confounding some affiliates in the process. And now publishers are starting to lash out.
The search engine first announced policy changes in March, with a targeted focus against spam pages. During that March update, Google made it clear it was looking to penalize third-party groups taking advantage of sites with established domain authority to host their content.
Initially this policy specified that content written by third parties and then hosted on sites with established authority were the issue. However, as the months have passed and Google is now issuing manual penalties related to its spam policies, pages written by the established sites themselves if the content appeared to be outside the scope of specialty knowledge the site is known for.
Adweek reported Monday that the trade group News Media Alliance penned an open letter to both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice urging them to investigate the algorithm change, which has upended a wide range of publishers, including Forbes, local media outlets and the entire U.S. gambling affiliate industry.
In the letter, NMA Chief Executive Danielle Coffey warned of the months it could take for sites to recover if manually removed by Google from results.
In response to the outcry, Google posted a new FAQ section to its page about site reputation abuse. It clarified that certain third-party content is allowed and the intent is not to punish affiliates.
On the updated page about the policy, Google stands by its decision.
“Since launching the policy, we’ve reviewed situations where there might be varying degrees of first-party involvement, such as cooperation with white-label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements. Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that 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,” the page reads.
