A Nightmare on Affiliate Street – How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its ‘Site reputation abuse’ spam policy

It’s Halloween season and I love a good scare. Jack-o-lanterns, trick or treating, costume parties, and a long list of horror movies playing around the clock. And that includes classic slasher films where Freddy, Jason, or Michael Myers methodically pick off one cast member at a time. Well, that’s pretty much what I’m seeing right…

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Hijacking The Back Button and SEO: Gaming Navboost, Exploring Google Spam Policies, And What It Might Signal About Your Aggressive Advertising Situation

In an effort to keep users on their sites, some publishers have hijacked the browser back button by providing a feed of articles that drives users to more publisher content, including sponsored content and ads. That’s versus allowing them to return to the sites they visited from… Disabling, or hijacking the back button, is a…

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Beyond Reddit and Quora: How Google’s Hidden Gems Update Yielded Explosive Growth In Search Visibility For Many Forums

In May of 2023 Google wrote a blog post where it explained it was planning to update its systems to surface “hidden gems”, or content written from a “personal or expert point of view”. We eagerly awaited that update when the ‘fall of insane updates’ arrived including three core updates, a massive helpful content update,…

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Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy and why an algorithmic approach to enforcing violations is the way forward

Google began enforcing its site reputation abuse spam policy on May 7, 2024 after announcing the policy two months earlier (when the March 2024 core update rolled out). At that time, we didn’t know if enforcement would be handled via manual actions, an algorithm update, or a combination of both. It ended up being just…

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Google March 2024 Core Update Case Study: A tale of four tremors, reversals, and a great example of the counterbalancing of systems

This is my second post in a series about the March 2024 broad core update. Again, it was a huge update with many moving parts, so I wanted to cover several interesting things that went on versus writing just one post. For this post, I’m going to cover a very interesting case study that underscores…

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The March 2024 Google core update and how the transition of Google’s helpful content system to its core ranking system is supposed to work

I cover the old HCU(X) classifier, site-level quality algorithms, the counterbalancing of systems, and how the transition has been as smooth as a bed of razor blades… This is the first post in a series about the March 2024 broad core update. The update was one of the largest and most complex core updates Google…

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5 ways that Google’s helpful content system could evolve based on the evolution of previous punitive algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin

Update March 20, 2024: Helpful content system baked into core ranking systems.The March 2024 core update rolled out alongside a spam update on March 5, 2024, and Google announced the helpful content system is now part of Google’s core ranking systems. That means there will not be additional helpful content updates (and the way the…

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