Scaled content and recycled domains
Generating hundreds of worthless pages, buying an expired domain for its reputation, or renting out your good name to third-party content: the three practices Google added by name to its rules in March 2024. Punished practices series, part five.
The cheats of the previous parts are as old as the web. These ones carry a date: in March 2024, Google announced the addition of three practices to its spam policies, in direct response to the industrialization of content, the kind that automatic writing tools had just made trivial.
Content produced at scale
The rule targets the production of many pages whose purpose is to place in the rankings, not to help anyone. The important point is what it does not say: it doesn’t condemn the tool, it condemns the result. Generating a thousand hollow pages by hand was already spam before automatic writing tools; generating them by machine changes nothing, and a useful page remains useful whatever the way it was made. The criterion is the one behind all of Google’s doctrine: does the page bring something to the person reading it, or does it exist only to occupy a query?
The concrete temptation for an SME: the tool or provider offering to “cover every commune in the canton”, a hundred identical pages where only the town name changes. That is precisely the pattern the rule describes, and it is also, as we saw in part two, a variation on stuffing: lots of signals, no substance. Three real local pages, with the worksites, the photos and the particularities of each place, beat a hundred templates.
Recycled expired domains
Second addition: expired domain abuse. The scheme consists of buying up a lapsed domain name, that of a dissolved association, of a closed shop, to host unrelated content on it, hoping to inherit the reputation and the links the deceased had accumulated. It is a usurped inheritance: the links pointing at that domain recommended the old site, not the new tenant.
To be distinguished from an honest purchase: taking over a domain to continue or revive a comparable activity is in no way forbidden. The fraud lies, once again, in the mismatch between what the signals say and what the site is.
Squatted reputation
Third addition, known as site reputation abuse: an established site rents out a section of its domain to third-party content, casino or credit pages published under a newspaper’s address, so that this content benefits from the trust built by the host. The reader believes in the newspaper’s endorsement; the newspaper has done nothing but collect the rent. An SME is hardly in a position to commit that abuse itself, but it can be taken in by it: the “guaranteed publication on a major media outlet” sold to you by email is often exactly that, the bought link of part three in fancier clothes.
The common thread
All three practices cash in on a trust they did not build: that of the rankings, that of a domain, that of a brand. It is the very definition of the unfairness this series has been following since part one, and that is why Google could add them without changing its principle: the list grows longer, the rule stays the same.
Final part: fake reviews and artificial engagement, the cheat closest to your customers, and the only one that is also, in Switzerland, legal ground.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.