During the March 2024 Spam Update, Google pre-announced a new spam factor called “Site reputation abuse,” targeting a May 5 rollout. In Google’s

Google’s Surgical Strike on Reputation Abuse

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2024-05-15 07:30:04

During the March 2024 Spam Update, Google pre-announced a new spam factor called “Site reputation abuse,” targeting a May 5 rollout. In Google’s own words:

As of May 8, there are unmistakable signs of Google taking a scalpel to reputation abuse. Below are the ten sites that lost the most visibility between May 5 and May 8, across roughly 2 Million US/desktop keywords in our daily STAT data:

Day-over-day losses and gains can be very difficult to interpret in the real-time space of Google rankings and the ever-changing internet, but this is one of those rare cases where we not only have a warning from Google but can easily spot major patterns.

Let’s start with the obvious — These are 100% losses, and all but one of the top ten sites was a coupon or discount code subdomain. Sometimes, correlation does imply causation. Most of these are major brands and are instantly recognizable in their target markets. While this data is only derived from en-US Google SERPs, we still see dramatic losses for other English-language markets, including the UK, Australia, and Canada. The following table has the top losses for major media sites focused on the US market:

While the second half of this list experienced less-than-total losses, you’ll notice that the losses were against the primary domain or “www” subdomain. Note that our data set does contain many coupon-related terms and may not fully represent news-related searches. These visibility losses may not accurately represent non-coupon traffic losses. In almost all of these cases, there are no signs (as of this writing) that the sites in question attempted to deindex their content via Meta-Robots or Robots.txt. We cannot determine from this data set whether the impact was due to a manual action or algorithm update.