"Updating our site reputation abuse policy" is how Google, in 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 product reviews and seen many long-established news sites "reviewing" products—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 reviews 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.
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The "site reputation abuse" Google is targeting takes many forms, but it has one common theme: using an established site's domain history to sell things, often under a secondary name. 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.