Daniel García la Torre

One curveball from the Site Reputation Abuse manual actions that I’m not sure most people realize: It’s not just the content coming directly from third party partnerships that’s getting penalized. Google is also sending manual actions to sites with affiliate/partner content *even if that content is entirely written by the staff at the publication.* I’ve heard and seen at least 4 examples of this today. And it can affect individual URLs, not just subfolders/subdomains. Google just changed its Site Reputation Abuse language around “first party involvement” in a big way yesterday, as shown in the attached image (thanks @rustybrick) So yes - while sites had ~7 months to prepare for Site Reputation Abuse penalties, there are definitely some examples where the sites actually didn’t know their setup violated the policy.

Yeah, pretty ironic that Google would - recommend that travel bloggers share first-hand experience of traveling to places - implement algo updates resulting in many examples of travel bloggers who actually did exactly that, and saw their sites obliterated by HCU and March core updates - now use SGE to provide even more generic travel advice from a literal AI - not even a human - who, by definition, has never traveled to the place and can never travel to the place.

Google just put the “is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?” question to bed in its new SEO guidance. Plus some other goodies 🍿 (Meanwhile I am sitting here bracing for those who lack critical thinking skills to come at me about how E-E-A-T doesn’t matter)