Google has implemented a new site reputation policy and it’s now in effect.

 

The updated policy language as of now is.

Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reputation-abuse

 

 

Forbes and a few other sites have received manuel actions for violating google’s new reputation policy thus far:

Forbes advisor has been completely deindexed for violating google’s new reputation policy.

 

 

https://searchengineland.com/google-site-reputation-abuse-policy-now-includes-first-party-involvement-or-oversight-of-content-448432

Lillyray has chimed in how this new policy will effect a lot of websites in the rankings:

 

Early thoughts about how Site Reputation Abuse will impact the SERPs:

 

Obviously, the biggest players have (finally) been removed from top positions for all kinds of high-volume keywords.

 

Many of the same sites that people have been complaining about being able to rank for everything for the past couple of years.

 

This frees up a whole lot of SEO opportunity, visibility and traffic for other sites not engaged in Site Reputation Abuse, such as specialized product review/affiliate sites, plus informational publishers.

 

Think Nerdwallet, Investopedia, Tech Radar, Tech Crunch, Nolo, Bankrate, etc.

 

The providers that the affiliate sites linked to - like insurance companies, VPNs, etc. - will probably see improved rankings as well.

 

Beyond that, this change will absolutely benefit Reddit and Quora even more, as Google has been showing a ton of forum results & "Discussions and Forums" for review & comparison content. I'm already seeing Reddit take top positions where Forbes ranked before.

 

Ecommerce sites will likely benefit as well, especially if they have blogs and upper-funnel content that answers questions previously targeted by the penalized publishers. (See Purina example below, and don't ask me why Purina Arabia ranks #1 in the US 😅)

 

Also, small sites like law firm websites, government websites, and other "authorities" will gain rankings lost by many YMYL queries where these big players ranked on top for years.