In case you’re unfamiliar with the story so far, Google rolled out its Site Reputation Abuse policy on Sunday May 5th, taking manual action against pages it deemed to be ‘spam’; in many cases, deindexing them or slashing their SEO.
‘Manual action’ means that actual humans at Google surveyed and reviewed these sites before enforcing strikes against them. An algorithmic wave of strikes is expected to be implemented sometime soon.
Google’s actions have been highly controversial. Amongst the list of usual spam tactics, like keyword stuffing, malware and link-cloaking, it added news sites ‘hosting coupons provided by a third party’.
