Google has once again expanded the reach of its site reputation abuse policy, beyond the US enforcement from from May and beyond limited European regions last week - we are now seeing enforcement in the massive German market.
I believe Christian Kunz reported this first on his German SEO blog. He told me on X, "Google has probably taken first manual actions in Germany against site reputation abuse. A SERP for coupon codes that previously showed many news websites is now free from third party content in the top rankings."
He shared this screenshot showing the Google search results for a query on [Zalando discount code], where large sites that were doing site reputation abuse types of content, vanished from the results:
Then Laura Chiocciora replied on X showing a search for [adidas rabattcode] from the day before and day after - again, sites vanishing:
Then Glenn Gabe shared some charts on X and wrote, "Checking several of the sites I have documented reveals drops starting yesterday (1/27). See some screenshots below." Here are his charts:
And this site command:
So something big is shaking down in Germany around this site reputation abuse policy. I suspect we will see Google continue enforcement of this policy in more regions and languages through manual actions in the coming days/weeks.
Here is an example of a manual action for one of the affected websites: pic.twitter.com/UonL56mwz4
— SEO Südwest (@SEO_Suedwest) January 29, 2025
Forum discussion at X.
Update: Sweden too?
@rustybrick We're seeing the same in Sweden since last week: https://t.co/5rDGmyrYI0
— Hektor (@hektorjeppesen) January 29, 2025
Major media brands have only 10 indexed pages, it used to be thousands of pages indexed and high rankings. Searching for "SvD rabattkoder" will not show their directory.
Also affecting Norway. pic.twitter.com/TGw3oYFle9
