What’s with Google Site Reputation Abuse?

Site Reputation Abuse is a common practice in which main websites add or publish third-party pages to benefit from their ranking signals and abuse search rankings. These third-party pages can be advertising partners or sponsored pages that do not connect with the main site’s role and purpose.

Let me explain. You have seen medical websites that rank top in search results for various keywords with high search volume. Just consider if these sites host a page about “best loans or casinos,” which is a completely irrelevant topic. What do you think will happen? It is not only about the traffic; such pages are designed to manipulate search rankings.

Remember, it is not just medical sites, you can find similar examples reporting Site Reputation Abuse.

Last Week in Zurich, during the Google Search Central Live event, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison highlighted this topic and guided people on how they can treat Google sites within a site.

He clearly stated irrelevant third-party pages can confuse users, so it is best to create a separate section within your site or buy a new domain for your content.

What are your thoughts on this?

Also, let me be clear, press release service sites or forum websites do not come under site reputation abuse. Coupons sourced straight from businesses do not fall under this category.

Some of you may also have questions on how to stop your hosting pages from violating policies.

The answer is simply following the above strategy or excluding third-party pages from indexing using the noindex rule, disallowing crawling, etc.

Stay tuned for more such insights.