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:

“Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site's strong reputation. For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.”

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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.

This is a minefield topic in SEO, so let me focus on a very specific question — did the coupon content have to live on a subdomain to be affected? We can see from the table above that the short answer is no. In the last five cases (and many others), a subfolder was involved:

• www.latimes.com/coupon-codes

• www.miamiherald.com/coupons

• www.oregonlive.com/casinos

• www.inquirer.com/sports/betting

• www.mlive.com/betting/reviews

Looking at anecdotal evidence, it does appear that pages in the main sections of sites were also penalized. For example, consider this block of content from an article in the “Careers & Education” section of a local news website:

I won’t share the title or URL of the article, but in this case, the entire article was clearly promoted content written to house third-party discount codes. Hiding this content in other sections of your site is not going to spare you from the Google scalpel.

You may have noticed that the five data points above raise another important question…

While retail coupon codes are easier to spot due to the prevalence of subdomains, three of the five subfolder examples are gambling-related. In each of these cases, it appears that the subfolder housed some degree of paid or affiliate content that may have exploited the site’s overall authority or reputation (regional news sites, in two cases).

Here’s some example content that is promotional and may contain affiliate links:

While I hesitate to call out any one site, I do think it’s critical to understand the type of content impacted, and this content has many similarities to coupon codes and promotions.

In our data set, there was also limited evidence of payday loan affiliate content being penalized, but this content was more isolated and harder to spot. Be warned that the realm of site reputation abuse is in no way limited to retail coupons and promotional codes.

These aren’t easy questions. On the one hand, many of these sites do clearly fit Google’s warning and were using their authority and reputation to rank content that is low-relevance to the main site and its visitors. With any punitive action, though, the problem is that the sites ranking below the penalized sites may not be of any higher quality. Is USA Today’s coupon section less useful than the dedicated coupon sites that will take its place from the perspective of searchers? Probably not, especially since the data comes from similar sources.

There is a legitimate question of trust here — searchers are more likely to trust this content if it’s attached to a major brand. If a site is hosting third-party content, such as a coupon marketplace, then they’re essentially lending their brand and credibility to content that they haven’t vetted. This could be seen as an abuse of trust.

In Google’s eyes, I suspect the problem is that this tactic has just spread too far, and they couldn’t continue to ignore it. Unfortunately for the sites that were hit, the penalties were severe and wiped out impacted content. Regardless of how we feel about the outcome, this was not an empty threat, and SEOs need to take Google’s new guidelines seriously.