Third-party section not integrated with the host site (site reputation abuse)

Google's spam policies say such sections are assessed on presentation, quality, authorship and duplication. Outside the EEA a violation can bring a manual action on the section; inside the EEA the section may be separated and ranked without the host's signals.

Either integrate the section editorially (host branding, named author and responsible editor, commercial disclosure, internal links from relevant sections, content written for this site) or exclude it from Search with noindex.

1. Crawl the site and group URLs by directory or subdomain; flag sections whose topics (for example coupons, casinos, loans, CBD, 'best' product lists) are unrelated to the site's main subject.
2. For each flagged section, compare template, author bylines, disclosure text and internal inlinks from the homepage and main sections against the core editorial pages.
3. Take three to five distinctive sentences from sample pages and run exact-match searches; note any section whose copy appears on several other domains.
4. Check Search Console's Manual actions report and messages for a site reputation action.
5. Record the section as failing when it is unintegrated on at least two of the four factors Google lists (presentation, quality, authorship, duplication).

Written for the Site reputation abuse page (evidence: Confirmed).

Direct where a manual action is applied: affected pages can lose visibility for searchers outside the EEA. Indirect elsewhere: a separated section loses the benefit of site-wide signals. Size of traffic loss is an estimate only.

Google Search Central spam policies page (site reputation policy section), the March 2024 and November 2024 Search Central blog posts, and the August 2026 update to the policy.