Last week, eagle-eyed SEOs spotted a familiar pattern emerging across coupon pages in Europe.
Newspaper sites hosting coupon pages were vanishing from Google search results, seemingly overnight. Their overall traffic was diminishing too.
Unmistakably, this was the mark of Google’s site reputation abuse update.
Last year, the update categorised this kind of coupon provider as ‘spam.’ Swiftly, it targeted a number of massive players in the space across the UK and US.
European sites enter the crosshairs
Now, the update is continuing its crackdown throughout the world’s affiliate coupon communities.
Laura Chiocciora, Head of SEO at Bravo Savings Network, flagged the disappearance of major coupon providers from Italy’s search results on X and then shared a screenshot showing the same happening in Spain.
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One commenter replied, “I can confirm one of the biggest sports newspaper(s) in Italy had his sportsbetting/gambling hosted section banned from SERPs. They call it partnership, we call it parasite SEO / site reputation abuse.”
SEO expert Glenn Gabe shared two screenshots comparing French search results for ‘code lego’ in December 2024 and January 2025.
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In the former, several newspaper sites sit at the top of results: Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Nouvel Obs.
In the latter, these sites are nowhere to be seen, replaced primarily by the retailer site.
Gabe also shared several screenshots showing the demising traffic of coupon sites in the EU.
Yesterday, the update spread to publishers in Germany.
SEO Südwest shared the news to X that news sites hosting third-party coupon pages SERPs were absent from the SERPs.
Chiocciora replied with an image of all those that had been hit, including FOCUS, BILD, CHIP, and others.
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Gabe corresponded with more evidence that publishers’ traffic had crashed that week.
Today, Gabe shared an update on LinkedIn, stating that the drops are “big”.
He believes we are now in the second phase of Google’s manual actions against European sites.