When Google incorporated the Helpful Content Update (HCU) into its core ranking algorithms last March, it was pure carnage. Some sites lost as much as 80% of their organic traffic and it was all that SEOs could talk about for weeks. That’s why most of us can be excused if Google’s announcement that it would penalize “site reputation abuse spam” flew right past our heads.

To be fair, I didn’t think much of it either even as Danny Sullivan made the announcement on X that the search giant would start enforcing the policy on May 7th starting with mannual actions followed by algorithmic sanctions later on. I was skeptical on whether Google would follow through with its warning or not. After all, web spam manual actions have been pretty rare in the past 8 years or so. I figured that if these manual actions do start flying out, they’ll be no more than Google propaganda to scare website owners into complying with their new rules.

Lo and behold, s**t just got real. I received an inquiry from a website owner whose organic traffic dropped significantly after receiving a notice in Google Search Console informing him that he’s in violation of the site reputation abuse spam policy. Needless to say, the guy was spooked. In this post, we’ll examine what the website did to incur the penalty and what we did to get it revoked.

What is Site Reputation Abuse Spam?

Site reputation abuse spam is the act of publishing content in another website in order to rank for a target keyword by proxy. When a keyword is so competitive that your own website can’t climb its way  to the first page, you might consider publishing a landing page on another website that has the kind of ranking signals to get it done. Through shrewd copywriting and design, you can then funnel the organic traffic that it receives to your own domain.

People in the SEO community have called this tactic barnacle SEO, parasite SEO and other nicknames, but the basic procedure is the same:

  1. Target a competitive keyword
  2. If your money site can rank for it, good. If it can’t, find a website that can.
  3. Research a seto of websites with high domain authority ratings, social media followings and good brand equity.
  4. Conduct outreach to the website and see if the webmasters are willing to host content that targets the tough keyword.
  5. Check if the webmasters are interested in money, co-promotions, X-deals or anything else that you can offer.
  6. Once you come to an agreement, write the content that will target the desired keyword directly.
  7. After the content is reviewed and published, wait for it to get indexed and see how it ranks.
  8. Most of the time, the new webpage will land on the first page or close to it if you chose a good website to host it on.
  9. If the webpage needs to move up a few more spots, build backlinks to it and give it a lift.
  10. Add calls to action and links to your own money website to funnel organic traffic towards it.

While it may sound a little shady, this technique was perfectly legitimate until Google said it no longer was a few months back.

In case you’re still not sure how this would work in real life, here’s a theoretical example: suppose I want to rank for the keyword “home loans Philippines” and I’m doing SEO for a lowly rural bank in Guagua, Pampanga. A quick search on Google will reveal that the keyword’s SERP is dominated by heavy hitters such as Pag-Ibig, PNB, LandBank, BDO and more. Each of these banks’ websites have domain authority ratings of 40 or higher, while mine is at 20.

It doesn’t matter how much technical SEO, content optimization and on-page SEO I do: there ain’t no way I’m leapfrogging the big boys without building a stellar backlink profile of my own. Unfortunately, that will require at least a year of consistent link acquisition and a lot of money – neither of which are in my pool of resources.

So I’m left with two choices: try doing regular SEO and inevitably fall short of the target, or do barnacle SEO on a website that can outrank the major banks and at least have some control on the #1 search result.

Easy choice.

The next step would be to find a website with greater authority and readership signals, so I enlist the help of one of the biggest SEO dogs in the yard: Rappler. I conduct outreach and convince them to let me write an advertorial titled “The Best Credit Cards in the Philippines.” It lists all the major banks, but my little rural bank’s credit card is conveniently positioned at the top where it can get the most impressions and click-throughs.

The article eventually goes live and debuts at Google’s 3rd spot in the SERPs. I do a little link building straight to the Rappler page and within 2 months, it hits the #1 spot on Google. The page receives 25,000 organic users per month and 11,000 of them click through on my bank’s mention at the top of the page, giving me plenty of referral traffic and qualified leads – not to mention a juicy Rappler backlink which incrementally boosts my own website’s SEO.

That’s how barnacle/parasite SEO works, or as Google now calls it, site reputation abuse spam. Again, the above example is purely fictitious and hypothetical. It does not, in any way, imply that Rappler is involved in any such dealings whatsoever.

How Do I Know My Site Incurred a Manual Action?

Even if you’ve never read up on what site reputation abuse spam is, Google will spell it out for you if one of your websites ever get whacked for it. In the message you’ll receive on GSC, it will say something like this:

“A portion of your site contains content that violates our spam policy on 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. Learn more.”

In keeping with tradition, Google’s manual action message on this policy is still pretty vague especially for folks who don’t keep up with SEO news. Let’s break down what the message means by explaining key sections:

  • First Party. This is the website that was penalized because it hosts content from external entities that Google sees as having intentions of manipulating the SERPs.
  • Third Party. This is the website that approached the first party for a publication opportunity. Essentially, the rural bank’s SEO guy in our previous example.
  • Third Party Pages. The webpage in the first party’s website where the third party’s content is posted. It can be an article, an advertorial, or any other content form.
  • Taking Advantage of Ranking Signals. This part means that the third party piggybacked a ranking spot on Google off of the first party’s SEO strength.
  • Independent of Main Purpose. This is important. It hints that a human web spam team member is more likely to levy the reputation abuse penalty on the first party if the third party content posted on its pages is a significant departure from its core topics.
  • Little to No Value to Users. If the third party content is just there to rank and not to provide value to the first party site’s following.

Knowing what these key phrases mean in the context of the Google message will help you better understand what they’re hinting at and what you should address to set things right.

Site Reputation Abuse Triggers

So, what kind of third party content can trigger the site reputation abuse penalty? Here are the most common ones:

  • Barnacle/Parasite SEO. As discussed earlier, these are usually landing pages written for the primary purpose of ranking for a specific keyword using another website’s ranking power. These are usually promotional or semi-promotional in nature, depending on what the host website will allow.
  • Fake Reviews. In some cases, third parties won’t be allowed to post promotional landing pages on a host website’s domain. In those cases, they opt for the next best thing: a fake review. These are usually overly positive in their tone, with little evidence of the first party’s editorial team having any real world experience in using the product or service being described.
  • User-Generated Content. Some websites allow users to post their own content without much oversight. Meaning, editors don’t screen for the intent and quality of the material posted. Back in the day, this was a good way to generate backlinks, but since the nofollow attribute came along, that practice has ground to a halt. These days, some SEOs use this scheme to try and rank for tough keywords using popular platforms that let them post freely.
  • Advertorials. These are typically paid opinion or feature pieces that are posted in websites with big readerships to give a brand exposure. In the case of site reputation abuse purveyors, they also do it to rank for a keyword using another website’s sway over Google’s algorithms.
  • Guest Posts. We all know what these are by now, but guest posts are basically blog articles submitted to another website for publication. They were originally intended for cross-promotion between blog authors, but the practice later became a link building vehicle. These days, it’s also used for site reputation abuse purposes.

These are just the most common types of pages that Google’s reviewers will look hard at. However, any type of content that’s perceived to be piggybacking off of an influential host site is technically fair game.

How to Address the Reputation Abuse Penalty

Fortunately, getting the site reputation abuse penalty lifted isn’t as tedious and frustrating as working on a backlink-related penalty. The fix is pretty straightforward as you can either of these:

  • Delete the third party content. Removing the content and making sure the URL gives a hard 404 Not Found response.
  • Deindex the third party content. Blocking indexing on Google using the noindex meta robots tag instead of the robots.txt protocol.

Whichever approach you choose, you still need to submit a reconsideration request via Search Console similar to what’s outlined in this guide. If successful,  you should receive a response from Google’s web spam team notifying you that the manual action is revoked.

If you’re running the first party website and have experienced significant organic traffic loss when the manual action was levied, don’t expect it to come back. The penalty may have been lifted but you lost the landing page/s that’s ranking and scooping up traffic in the process.

If you want to recover that ranking spot and traffic (assuming that the content was contextually relevant to your content), I recommend that you create new content that targets the same keyword that the old third party content did. Make sure that this time, it actually provides unique value to your readers. Here’s a guide on doing just that.

Limitations of the Site Reputation Abuse Penalty

While this case of site reputation abuse being penalized manually does hit closer to home now, we have to be objective about its overall impact on SEO. Just because a few websites were penalized manually doesn’t mean Google is going to catch all the fish in the sea. We’ve seen how Google struggles with this in the past and oftentimes, manual actions do more to scare would-be offenders than actually whacking sites that are guilty of the violation. There are still a ton of SERPs out there where the top result is clearly just piggybacking other websites. Here’s one for “SEO Services Philippines”:

Pretty sure that you’ve never heard of many of the so-called top SEO agencies listed by Clutch. If that’s not a clear case of third parties leveraging Clutch’s ability to rank because they can’t do it themselves, I don’t know what is.

Another limitation of this manual approach to penalizing site reputation abusers is that webmasters can just pull a bait and switch. Meaning, they can delete or deindex the third party content that triggered the penalty in their websites and get the penalty revoked. Afterwards, they can simply undelete or re-index the pages and they can start ranking again.

It begs the question of what Google would do when this happens. Will it simply ignore the repeat offense and move on to new targets or would it come back and dock the offending website for being a smartypants about the situation?

The only thing we know for sure is that an algorithmic approach would be much better at curtailing site reputation abuse. Right now, we don’t know how soon that will come but when it does – and if it’s as good as advertised – a lot of Clutch websites will be sweating hard.