From the article: … This is pretty far into the weeds, but it shows how every aspect of the way Google does search ranking gets exploited in the market. In Google’s algorithm, domain names have...
From the article:
Google has started its enforcement of the new site reputation abuse policy by deranking or deindexing portions of websites from the Google Search index. This seems to have launched in the past hour or so, where sites as large as CNN, USA Today, Fortune, and LA Times are seeing their coupon directories no longer ranking for coupon-related keyword phrases.
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Google informed us after this story that these are manual actions, not algorithmic actions. Meaning sites impacted by this site reputation abuse policy should have received notifications of these penalties in their Search Console profiles.
Danny Sullivan from Google told me, “we’re only doing manual actions right now. The algorithmic component will indeed come, as we’ve said, but that’s not live yet.”
This is pretty far into the weeds, but it shows how every aspect of the way Google does search ranking gets exploited in the market. In Google’s algorithm, domain names have reputation. Coupon sites want to rank higher than other coupon sites. So, that means a domain name’s reputation can be rented out. Ordinary users of the domain name never see these pages unless they search for coupons.
An interesting question is, how will Google be able to implement an automatic fix? It seems like they need to detect websites that share a domain name but otherwise have nothing to do with each other. The concept of “what is a website” needs to become more flexible in their algorithm, so they can give each website a separate reputation.
How will website owners react? Maybe by making these separate websites more intertwined so that Google can’t easily distinguish them.
In the early days, Google would delist a website for shenanigans but they’re probably more cautious about using their power like that now.
From the article:
…
This is pretty far into the weeds, but it shows how every aspect of the way Google does search ranking gets exploited in the market. In Google’s algorithm, domain names have reputation. Coupon sites want to rank higher than other coupon sites. So, that means a domain name’s reputation can be rented out. Ordinary users of the domain name never see these pages unless they search for coupons.
An interesting question is, how will Google be able to implement an automatic fix? It seems like they need to detect websites that share a domain name but otherwise have nothing to do with each other. The concept of “what is a website” needs to become more flexible in their algorithm, so they can give each website a separate reputation.
How will website owners react? Maybe by making these separate websites more intertwined so that Google can’t easily distinguish them.
In the early days, Google would delist a website for shenanigans but they’re probably more cautious about using their power like that now.