They say you can’t fight city hall. And if you’re a news publisher hoping to make some extra bucks by offering a collection of online coupon codes, you apparently can’t fight Google, either.
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, when searches for online coupons are more important than ever, Google is intensifying its crackdown on “coupon spam.” The goal is to help ensure you get your coupons from a dedicated coupon site and not a site pretending to be one.
After a policy update earlier this year sent major news publishers’ coupon pages plummeting in Google search results, the search engine giant says it’s now reviewing these sites on a case-by-case basis. And despite many publishers’ earnest efforts to convince Google that they’re very, very involved in their coupon pages, which provide very, very valuable content to their readers, Google appears very, very unconvinced.
“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,” Google has announced in the latest revision of its site reputation abuse policy. So “we’re clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior,” the statement went on. The updated policy now states that “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.”
That pretty much describes what many news websites and their coupon-providing partners have been doing for years. If you’ve ever done a Google search for an online coupon, and among the first search results were news sites like the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or USA Today, you ended up visiting that site, found your coupon, and wondered why a news organization had a page on their website devoted to coupon codes anyway – that’s no accident. News publishers and third-party coupon code aggregators have established a symbiotic relationship, with Google as their host. The coupon providers piggyback on the news sites’ reputations and high Google search rankings to ensure their coupons catch your eye first. And the news sites, in turn, get a small fee for each coupon code that’s used.
To Google, though, this is manipulation that taints the perceived purity of their search results. Top results for any search should be the best results, not whatever sites are best able to game the system to ensure they show up before anyone else.
Many news publishers have tried to convince Google that their coupon pages are part of their editorial mission; that they have dedicated staff working directly with their coupon providing partners to curate exactly the coupon codes that their readers are most interested in.
But Google isn’t buying it. “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),” it explained. So now “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.” According to Google’s latest spam policies, “coupons that are sourced directly from merchants and other businesses that serve consumers” are okay. But “a news site hosting coupons provided by a third-party where the main reason for publishing the coupons on the news site is to capitalize on the news site’s reputation” is not.
Since Google began implementing its new policies earlier this year, some publishers have given up and unpublished their coupon pages, for fear of having their entire sites penalized and lowered in search rankings. Others who have clung to their coupon pages have seen those pages plummet or disappear from Google search results. Still other publishers have taken to masquerading their coupon pages as “news” items, offering the same lists of coupon codes, but as part of purported retailer reviews or how-to guides (confused about how to use a coupon code? Just copy it, paste it, and save – easy!)
Those sites are now subject to Google’s manual reviews and may ultimately suffer the same fate as the sites that have vanished from Google search results. Google says it’s all about ensuring that users searching for coupons find the most relevant and helpful results, not just results that someone has managed to manipulate to the top. “This clarification to our site reputation abuse policy will help surface the most useful search results, combat manipulative practices, and ensure that all sites have an equal opportunity to rank based on the quality of their content,” Google explained.
So if you’re looking for news, you can visit a news site. If you’re looking for coupons, Google wants to make sure you’re directed to an actual coupon site. And if you’re looking for news about coupons – it looks like you already know where to find that.
Image source: Mockuper
