Monday, January 27, 2014
Our quality guidelines warn
against running a site with thin or
scraped content without adding
substantial added value to the user. Recently, we’ve seen this behavior on many video sites,
particularly in the adult industry, but also elsewhere. These sites display content provided by an
affiliate program—the
same content that is available across hundreds or even thousands of other sites.
If your site syndicates content that’s available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: “Does this
site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search
results instead of the original source of the content?” If the answer is “No,” the site may
frustrate searchers and violate our quality guidelines. As with any violation of our quality
guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality
of our users’ search results. If you have any questions about our guidelines, you can ask them in
our
Webmaster Help Forum.
How we apply this
Google announcements age. We keep this post here for the record, and we note for clients whether the behaviour it describes still applies today or has since been superseded.
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