Google sending manual actions for site reputation abuse in Germany

Google appears to be rolling out manual actions, search penalties, across German-based sites over the site reputation abuse policy. This comes a week or so after Google expanded the penalties across Europe, for sites in Italy, Spain, and France.

What we’re seeing. Christian Kunz, posted on his German-based SEO blog that Google has probably taken first manual actions in Germany against site reputation abuse. A search results set for coupon codes that previously showed many news websites is now no longer showing these sites in the top rankings. Laura Chiocciora, head of SEO at Bravo Savings Network, posted on X adding this morning:

Why we care. Google seems to accelerating its enforcement of the site reputation abuse policy well beyond the US and other regions now. It is just a matter of time until this expands to more and more regions and locations.

If you have content on your site that is going against this policy, then it might be time to start planning on removing it, even if you are in a country that has not been impacted yet.

U.S. manual actions. Google began penalizing sites under its (then) new search spam policies in March 2024. This was announced at the same time as the March 2024 Google core update, which Google’s Elizabeth Tucker called the biggest core update ever at SMX Advanced last year.

What is site reputation abuse? When third-party sites host low-quality content provided by third parties to piggyback on the ranking power of those third-party websites. As Google told us in March 2024:

• “A third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefit from the site.”
• “Such content ranking highly in Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.”

Under Google’s new policy, site reputation abuse is defined as “third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner” and “intended to manipulate Search rankings” will be considered spam.

The new Google Search spam policies about reputation abuse was announced by Google over here and and the updated policies are over here.

Later, Google expanded the policy to include first party content.

About manual actions. Websites that Google takes manual action are reviewed by humans – they are not given algorithmically. According to Google:

• “Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s spam policies. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user.”