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Where does advertorial stop, and parasite SEO begin? Google's experts say "Do as we say, not as we do..."
Is it possible to willingly damage the reputation of your own site in order to attempt to increase your chances of making some extra revenue?
A resounding yes is obviously the answer - we know this has happened many, many times, either wittingly or unwittingly.
Yet ultimately such actions are the decision of the site owner, in whatever form that takes. Speaking directly, it is your reputation to be besmirched and in a true commercial environment you live or die according to your own decisions.
Not so fast though.
That renowned arbiter of fair play, Google, has this week published its revised site reputation abuse policy - something which it has been enforcing less publicly for some time.
To quote the document in defining such behaviour: "This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host's already-established ranking signals".
It’s already hitting some very large sites very hard, as seen by SEO eagle-eye Glenn Gabe.
Err, isn't this, as one industry observer on LinkedIn noted "exactly what Google AdWords and Google AdSense are doing, taking advantage of sites with traffic to show their ads"?
Reading further into Google's spam policy documentation, examples given of such apparently egregious behaviour are:
Where does good old advertorial end, and "parasitic SEO" begin? Being that the advertising market is largely broken, if a medical site owner sees revenue in selling casino bumphery, then surely that is on them. If site users object, they can vote with their traffic and not bother with such sites. Likewise for a sports site, or any other site.
Being in possession of a YouTube premium subscription has made me ruminate on this already. I pay to not see adverts, and enjoy the benefits to my blood pressure that this provides.
However, nearly every single YT channel I subscribe to contains a short advertisement in their videos, usually voiced by the host or presenter. Whether these be for a VPN provider, a mobile gaming company, an "invest in gold" scheme or some dietary supplement, they're pretty standard now as creators seek to maximize their revenue outside of what Google-owned YouTube provides. They are easily overcome with the fast forward button.
Likewise, you would think, would be the case with the parasite SEO practices that Google is now going after. If you're looking up some education league tables from a reputable source, and you keep seeing advertorial site sections for Pay Day Loan schemes, then you can either ignore them, or take your eyeballs elsewhere.
If your commercial decisions trash your site's reputation and traffic, then surely it is your problem?
Ultimately, such a move limits the commercial space that site owners have to operate in, and Google have made it clear that even if first party production is involved in such content, then it will still be treated as spam and dealt with accordingly.
There's no special pleading either, as Lily Ray puts it, "basically, you can't say 'this isn't third party content because our own team is involved in the content creation/editing process.' This was an argument made by many sites involved in partnerships and white label relationships with external content providers."
It is no longer valid, according to Google.
This is from a company that spent the first half of the year surfacing Reddit and Quora content above everything else in search and crushing the traffic of long-established specialist sites. It's hard to see how such action has become a priority.
Nothing I have ever read in Google's official documentation has left me feeling I understand exactly what they require.
Such ambiguity suits them of course. It is necessary for them to offer the silhouette of a carrot, without actually providing a carrot.
It's hard to see the logic in this new stick they're beating site owners with, unless one is being cynical about Google wanting to control advertising under the guise of consumer protection.
Speaking of consumer protections, as a chaser to all this the first inklings of what a possible Google break-up might look like were revealed this week, with suggestions that a first step will be the forced disbursement of the Chrome browser - a prodigious source of user and habits data to the company.
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