Google Says Site Reputation Abuse Isn’t About Linking

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, made it crystal clear that the site reputation abuse policy has zero to do with linking. This means that who you link to and/or who links to you has no impact on this new policy that Google began enforcing with manual actions earlier this week.

Danny Sullivan said this on X, “Site reputation abuse isn’t about linking.” Instead, he said it is about the content, “It’s about content abusing a site’s reputation,” he wrote.

Here are those posts:

Site reputation abuse isn’t about linking. It’s about content abusing a site’s reputation. See here: https://t.co/Yl9XWr6aql

Link spam is an entirely different policy, and that’s where link qualification can be helpful (and it doesn’t matter nofollow vs sponsored). See here:…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 9, 2024

So if anyone was confused by this, it should now be crystal clear – this policy is about the content, not about the links.

Here is how Google defines site reputation abuse:

Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users.

Google posted more examples at the link above.

Forum discussion at X.