Google is further cracking down on sites publishing ‘parasite SEO’ content

Google is tightening its rules against “parasite SEO” content, or articles and pages that often have little to do with the site’s focus but that exploit the website’s Google ranking.

An example of parasite SEO content is a news blog that publishes online shopping coupon codes in a hidden part of its website or an educational site publishing unrelated affiliate marketing content. In March, Google announced it would crack down on this kind of “site reputation abuse,” and now it’s making it clear that it doesn’t matter if the publisher created the content themselves or outsourced it — it’s a search policy violation regardless.

“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,” Chris Nelson of Google’s search quality team wrote in a blog post. “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.”

Site reputation abuse takes many forms, and more than a few publishers have had to explain to the public why there’s spammy garbage on their otherwise reputable sites; a common defense has been that they themselves didn’t produce it.

Take Sports Illustrated, which last year was caught publishing AI-generated product recommendations on a weird, separate part of its website. Responding to questions from reporters, the outlet said the reviews were written by a third-party marketing firm, not Sports Illustrated staff — and as I later reported, this kind of marketing content was all over the web. As it turns out, the same third-party firm, AdVon Commerce, had also created product recommendation articles for USA Today. Google’s updated policy clarifies that a site doesn’t have to be directly responsible for creating the content to get dinged.