A few months ago, Google quietly updated the manual action policy violations list for News and Discover policy violations. Google removed the adult-theme and artificial freshening sections and then added a slew of deceptive practices sections, while also updating the hateful content section.
This change was spotted by Gagan Ghotra who nicely picked up on the change after I missed it. The change happened sometime between October 10th and November 27th, based on the Wayback Machine.
Here are the changes, with the new on the left and the old on the right:
You can drill through each and everyone of these policies over here.
Here is a quick list of the changes:
- Deceptive practices: Coordinated deceptive practices (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that appears to conceal or misrepresent the site ownership or purpose.
- Deceptive practices: Good neighbor policy (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that impersonates or conceals the organization that created the content.
- Deceptive practices: Impersonation (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that misrepresents the person or organization that provided the content.
- Deceptive practices: Misrepresentation of affiliation (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that seems to misrepresent or conceal the financial or editorial relationships of the content producers.
- Deceptive practices: Misrepresentation of location (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that seems to misrepresent or conceal the country of origin of the website.
Forum discussion at X.
