Websites that abuse their dominant position in one market to push completely unrelated content are facing a reckoning as Google cracks down on the practice.

It’s not uncommon for websites like Forbes Advisor, as well as many others, to push content that has nothing to do with the site’s core business. Google is updating its site reputation abuse policy in an effort to put an end to the practice.

The company outlined the changes in a developer blog post, detailing the various layers of the issue.

Earlier this year, as part of our work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience, we launched a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse. 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. The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users.

Since launching the policy, we’ve reviewed situations where there might be varying degrees of first-party involvement, such as cooperation with white-label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements. Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host’s sites ranking signals.

As a result, the company is changing its policy language to address the behavior.

We’re clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior. We’re making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site’s ranking signals is a violation of this policy — regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content. Our updated policy language, effective today, 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.

Google says it is not applying the new policy haphazardly, but taking multiple factors into consideration.

When evaluating for policy violations, we take into account many different considerations (and we don’t simply take a site’s claims about how the content was produced at face value) to determine if third-party content is being used in an abusive way. Site owners who receive a spam manual action will be notified through their registered Search Console account and can submit a reconsideration request.

It’s important to note that not all third-party content violates this policy. We go into detail on our spam policies page about what is and isn’t site reputation abuse.

Users and companies alike have been vocal about Google’s declining search quality. Once offering unrivaled search results, Google Search results are a far cry from the quality they once were. Hopefully, the company’s latest effort will result in higher quality results and a more level playing field.