Back in March this year, Google announced several new spam policies intended to fight the perceived degradation of their search results. One of these new policies was for ‘site reputation abuse’.

In previous newsletters I covered this policy and its impact once enforcement began in early May.

Fast-forward to the middle of November. For the last several months, publishers have been setting out their stalls in preparation for the biggest annual ecommerce weekend: Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Then Google decides to spoil everyone’s party:

This blog post on the Google Search Central blog explains how Google have ‘clarified’ their site reputation abuse policy.

“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.”

Their updated phrasing of site reputation abuse now reads as follows:

More importantly, Google now say that “we don't simply take a site's claims about how the content was produced at face value”.

They don’t care what you say about your affiliate content. If Google even remotely suspects it’s not entirely your own content and there might be any kind of 3rd party involvement, they’re gonna slap a penalty on that content and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

It didn’t take long for manual penalties to arrive:

These penalties number in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds. CNN Underscored, Forbes Advisor, WSJ Buy Side, and countless other publishers of all sizes have had their entire ‘shopping’ or ‘recommendations’ section wiped from Google’s search results, just in time for Black Friday weekend. One can only imagine the potential revenue loss.

Moreover, if you want to roll the dice by moving the content around and/or hiding it among your regular news output, there could be even more severe consequences:

Play games with Google’s policies and you could lose a lot more than just your affiliate traffic. Your entire presence in Google is at risk.

Penalty Accuracy?

While many of the penalties I’ve seen are for legitimate breaches of the reinterpreted spam policy, some of the penalised site sections are technically not in violation of the site reputation abuse policy.

The content on these sections is entirely first party, produced by actual employees, with no third-party involvement in the content. But this content contains affiliate links, and Google see that as sufficient evidence that this is 3rd party content.

Basically, Google are using the “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to penalising spam.

I see this as an admission of defeat. It’s become painfully clear that Google have no algorithmic way to accurately demote ‘spam’ content, however vaguely that is defined.

The numerous false positives from their Helpful Content Update algorithm changes were so vehemently protested that Google went into full defensive mode, going as far as to invite affected publishers to the Google offices for a group hug feel-good session (which, rather predictably, backfired).

Effectively, Google cannot find an algorithmic solution to their perceived search quality woes. Manual intervention is the only approach they can rely on.

Why Now?

Contrary to the first round of penalties in May 2024, there was no grace period for these latest penalties. Google updated their spam policy and started handing out manual penalties the very next day. No time to prepare, no time to change course, no time to do anything else but pray.

The timing of these penalties is dubious. First, with only a week left before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, publishers who had been building up to this period with their affiliate content suddenly find their whole strategy annulled.

There wasn’t not enough time to change gears and try to earn organic rankings with a different approach.

But there was enough time to try something else to recoup all that investment over these many months. Publishers could still buy Google Ads to drive traffic to their affiliate pages…

Secondly, these penalties appear to be a reaction to bad PR.

Not too long ago, a hit piece was published about Forbes Advisor, offering insight into how Forbes’ affiliate section operated. This piece was shared widely on social media and caused a stir in SEO circles.

The piece itself didn’t offer much controversial insights, unless you were entirely ignorant of how affiliate marketing works. But it got people talking about the ‘injustice’ of Forbes’s affiliate pages ranking for all kinds of commercial search queries.

Then there’s the popular ‘Goog Enough’ account on X that frequently posts screenshots of what are deemed ‘bad search results’, often tagging Google’s search liaison in those tweets. That account started as a showcase of bad AI Overviews, but has since evolved to expose a much broader range of perceived spam in search results.

I find both of these rather unpalatable. Google seems to be taking note of these ‘exposures’ and using them to hand out targeted penalties.

I think the people behind these accounts perhaps still see Google as their ally, working together with SEOs to improve search results.

But that ship has long sailed. Any SEO that still thinks Google wants to work with them to better the web is hopelessly naive. Google are actively using SEOs for their own benefit, and have no qualms about throwing the whole industry under the bus when it suits their purpose.

These sorts of public exposures also reek of bad sportsmanship. Can’t beat your competitors with better SEO? Just badmouth your rivals, make sure to tag Googlers in your posts, and have Google erase your competition from search results.

What’s Next?

The writing is on the wall, in bloated neon letters glaring blindingly into your eyes.

Google wants publishers to stay in their lane. Stick to your core purpose, and don’t stray from your chosen focus.

If you’re successful in one area and have built up a lot of authority signals, and you want to monetise that success in any other area that’s not your perceived core purpose, Google will eventually come for you.

Highly ironic, of course, because this is exactly what Google have been doing themselves for the past two and a half decades. What else is Google Travel, for example, but a way for Google to monetise their dominance in search in an entirely unrelated area way outside their core expertise…

Or Google Maps, Google Shopping, Google Finance, Google Books, Google Jobs, …

And when Google are themselves told to stay in their lane by regulators, they tend to throw a rather infantile hissy fit.

At the moment, the only form of affiliate revenue that appears untouched by Google’s wrath is the type founded on first-hand experience and expertise. If you want any affiliate revenue, you’re going to have to put in the hard work to build up the E-E-A-T signals that position you as an expert voice on whatever products or services you’re reviewing.

The likes of Wirecutter and Indy Best seem to fall within Google’s realigned parameters for acceptable affiliate marketing. As they should, of course, because if Google were to disapprove of even this type of thoroughly researched and professionally produced first-party content, then half the web might as well pack it up and call it quits.

Yet, Google are known for constantly moving their goalposts. So who knows? Soon any business model that Google can’t skim its own percentage from might be at risk.

Their game is up, after all. Perhaps the C-Suite in Mountain View realise this and are working to maximise their bonuses before it all comes crashing down.

It’s worth following Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe (and myself) on Bluesky for more insights and opinions on these latest penalties and other Google shenanigans.

(And yes, you should be on Bluesky now. X/Twitter is dead and it’s long past the time to move on, the corpse’s stench is already overwhelming.)

NESS 2024

The 4th edition of our News and Editorial SEO Summit took place at the end of October. I can honestly say it was another amazing event. We had over 500 attendees in total for 12 superb sessions across the online event’s two days.

Our good friends Jessie and Shelby from WTF is SEO? published their recaps of the two days, which give you a great taste of the quality of the talks and insights shared by our fantastic speakers:

1. What we learned at NESS 2024 (pt1)

2. What we learned at NESS 2024 (pt2)

The interaction among the attendees helped make this event special. So many great conversations in the chat, with attending publishers happy to share their own experiences and insights on the topics covered.

The Q&As also had great questions, allowing live attendees to get input from our expert speakers on their specific challenges.

All in all, NESS 2024 was another huge success. Onwards to NESS 2025!

Miscellanea

Here’s my usual roundup of new and updated Google documentation, interesting articles about publishing on the web, and the latest developments in SEO.

Official Google Docs:

• Providing more data about news results in the EU

• Updating our site reputation abuse policy

• Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box

• Favicon Guidelines [updated]

• URL structure best practices for Google [updated]

Interesting Articles:

• DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly - Bloomberg

• Google could be forced to sell Chrome – here’s what it would mean for users - i

• Are transformer-based foundation models running out of steam? - Understanding AI

• ChatGPT Search Fails Attribution Test, Misquotes News Sources - SEJ

• OpenAI Is Bad Business - Ed Zitron

• We need clarity about the deals between AI companies and news publishers - Reuters Institute

• Google Discover is sending U.S. news publishers much more traffic (Social? Still falling) - Nieman Lab

• Publishers hooked on Google Discover traffic risk race to the bottom - Press Gazette

• Google pulls news content from EU publishers in a limited-scale test - Phone Arena

• Algorithms are making political speech more extreme - User Mag

• The 'bias machine': How Google tells you what you want to hear - BBC

• News publishers didn’t sustain a traffic bump in the 2024 presidential election week like they did in 2020 - Digiday

• Bluesky already delivering more referral traffic than X for some publishers - Press Gazette

Latest in SEO:

• Google November 2024 core update rolling out now - SEL

• Google Core Update November 2024 - Risers and Fallers - Sistrix

• Crawl budget management for publishers and large sites - Leadership in SEO

• How Index States Indicate Crawl Priority - Indexing Insight

• How Google uses engagement metrics for search rankings - Leadership in SEO

• Google AI Overviews Rolling Out To 100+ Countries & Billion+ Users - SER

• What if Schema.org is just… Labels? - Jono Alderson

• US Presidential Election 2024 SEO Winners & Losers: A Detailed Analysis for News Publishers - NewzDash

• How to do SEO training in a newsroom - WTF is SEO?

That’s another long-delayed edition wrapped up. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing, and I’ll see you at the next one!