Google rolled out the site reputation abuse update on May 6, 2024. Google said the update kicked off a day earlier on May 5, 2024, though it only started issuing manual actions to affected sites on May 6, 2024.
Google’s Official Announcement
Google announced the update in response to a post by Katie Berry on X (formerly Twitter).
It'll be starting later today. While the policy began yesterday, the enforcement is really kicking off today.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 6, 2024
Notably, Google did not publish a dedicated post on X to announce the start of this update. Google did not announce the update on its search status dashboard either. But they did issue a reminder on April 30, 2024.
As a reminder, the last part of the March 2024 announcements, the new Google Search spam policies about reputation abuse, take effect after May 5, 2024. Find out more about these changes in the blog post https://t.co/FB8boxCFof and in our policies at https://t.co/2VxQuTF5pu . https://t.co/SHCWtk5tWv
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 30, 2024
What is the Site Reputation Abuse Update?
The site reputation abuse is a new addition to Google spam policies. It specifically targets sites hosting third-party content intended to manipulate search rankings.
The site hosting the content is typically uninvolved in the content creation process and typically only publishes the content in exchange for financial compensation.
The content is usually unhelpful, optimized for SEO, and intended to ride on the site’s reputation to rank and attract visitors from search results pages.
Google originally announced the update when it released the March 2024 Spam Update on March 5, 2024. However, Google mentioned the update would go live on May 5, 2024 (two months later) to give site owners enough time to comply.
What Are People Saying?
Barry Schwartz announced the search reputation abuse update on X and shared the Google Search Console dashboard of an affected site.
Google began enforcing the site reputation abuse policy yesterday https://t.co/88cT91K8pi pic.twitter.com/rzZKPMp2or
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) May 7, 2024
In another post, Barry mentioned that several major news agencies had been affected by the update, with entire sections of their sites deindexed from search results pages.
In response, Google Search Liaison clarified that the update is a manual action and not an algorithm update. However, Google Search Liaison revealed that an algorithm update would be released sometime down the road.
Not sure if you're still online, Barry — but we're only doing manual actions right now. The algorithmic component will indeed come, as we've said, but that's not live yet.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 7, 2024
Glenn Gabe also shared some insights on X and confirmed that Google had deindexed entire subdomains and subdirectories of highly authoritative news sites.
More about the Kraken Phase One: Again, the directories or subdomains are being deindexed. You can see screenshots below showing just a few urls remaining there for those areas… You can see Wired and Reuters below with just a handful of pages remaining there. But the good news… pic.twitter.com/a4pgkeCZc4
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 7, 2024
In another post, Glenn mentioned that sites affected by the update had suffered a drop in traffic since the fall of 2023 (between September and December 2023). He added that some of the sites were also partly affected during the initial March 2023 update.
Good morning Google Land! Yep, here we are again. 🙂 The May 5th date has passed and we can only assume the "Site reputation abuse" update is underway — or will be underway very soon. I am tracking directories, subdomains, and root domains of sites that are employing sponsored… pic.twitter.com/SjQ9REiVK2
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 6, 2024
What’s Next – Dealing With This Update
Affected sites have received manual action notifications in their Google Search Console. So, you should monitor your Google Search Console dashboard in case such notification pops up.
