Disallow, Canonicalize, Noindex, or Remove? How To Properly Block Content Violating Google's Site Reputation Abuse Spam Policy

Google recently rolled out two additional waves of manual actions for site reputation abuse targeting the EU (including Germany in the second wave). As I’ve been analyzing those drops, I noticed that sites are handling content violating the spam policy in several ways (and some are not the correct ways). For example, disallowing via robots.txt and canonicalizing are NOT valid approaches. Instead, noindexing or removing the content completely are the correct methods for dealing with a manual action for site reputation abuse.

In this video, I cover four methods that are being employed now by site owners and why only two are valid. I provide specific examples of sites using each approach and how that worked, or didn’t work, for the site at hand.

Companion blog post covering the topic: https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/how-to-block-content-site-reputation-abuse/

Chapters:

00:00 New manual actions for site reputation abuse and how sites are trying to block content

00:49 Disallowing via robots.txt (NOT VALID)

03:39 Canonicalizing site reputation abuse content (NOT VALID)

04:35 Noindexing content (VALID)

05:44 User-agent blocking

06:15 Removing content completely (VALID)

06:50 Summary: Two valid choices for blocking content for site reputation abuse

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