Google’s manual penalties for reputation abuse can have disastrous consequences for your visibility. Yet, many webmasters still use ineffective methods to block content deemed problematic. In this article, discover the most effective methods—and those to avoid—to avoid penalties.
Key points:
- Google continues to use manual actions to manage site reputation abuse, rather than a purely algorithmic approach.
- The only two effective methods for blocking problematic content are using a noindex tag or removing the content entirely.
- Blocking via robots.txt or canonicalizing content are ineffective methods that can lead to content being indexed and ranked.
- Google recently updated its documentation to clarify the use of noindex.
What is site reputation abuse according to Google?
Before diving into the technical solutions in more detail, let’s remember that site reputation abuse, or SEO parasite, concerns content that unfairly benefits from a domain’s reputation, but which is very different from the main content of the site.
Google has developed systems to identify these sections of content that are “independent or significantly different” from the main content. While Google could theoretically use these systems as a basis for automatically addressing site reputation abuse, the company continues to primarily apply manual actions to avoid the collateral damage that an algorithm could cause.
Google recently rolled out a series of manual enforcement actions in Europe targeting this type of violation. If you want to avoid falling victim to the Mountain View company’s policy, read on!
Ineffective methods for blocking problematic content
Block content with robots.txt
Contrary to what many site owners believe, blocking content via robots.txt is not a valid approach to handling a manual action for site reputation abuse. Here’s why:
- Pages blocked by robots.txt can still be indexed and ranked, Google just can’t crawl their content.
- This method is only valid for images and videos, not for HTML documents, especially if there are backlinks.
- Google does not recommend this approach in its official documentation.
A real-life example: A site recently saw its visibility drop after receiving a manual action. The site began both noindexing the content AND blocking it via robots.txt. The problem? Google couldn’t crawl the URLs to identify the presence of a noindex tag. As a result, the pages remained indexed and continued to rank well in search results. Oops!
Additionally, on March 12, 2025, Google updated its official documentation on manual actions to clearly state: “To ensure your noindex rule is effective, do not block this content with your robots.txt file.”
Canonicalize problematic content
This approach is also not recommended by Google. Some sites canonicalize URLs that violate the reputation abuse policy to the top-level directory or to other URLs.
It is important to understand that the rel=”canonical” tag is only a hint, not a directive. Google may therefore deliberately ignore the canonicalization set and index problematic URLs, which may then rank in the results pages.
An example? A powerful site has an entire directory of content that violates the reputation abuse policy. All URLs in this directory are canonicalized to another URL… which returns a 404 error. Despite this, Google indexed the directory’s URLs, which ranks for over 50,000 queries. Oops again!
Effective methods for blocking problematic content
Add a noindex tag
If you use noindex on content, Google will recrawl the URLs and then remove them from the index. Once removed from the index, they can no longer rank. Noindex is a directive, not a hint. So you don’t have to worry about whether Google will follow it or not. Once Google recrawls the URL and sees the noindex tag, the page is removed from the index.
Important: Do not use both noindex AND a robots.txt block. As explained above, this can lead to URLs remaining indexed without Google being able to crawl their content.
A success story: A site successfully applied noindex to all content in a directory that violated Google’s policy. After submitting a reconsideration request, the manual action was lifted. Visibility briefly increased while Google recrawled all URLs, then declined sharply as Google removed the pages from the index.
Completely delete content (404 or 410 errors)
This solution is as simple as it is radical: if you completely delete the content or directory containing the problematic pages, it obviously can no longer rank in search results. It definitely works!
However, it’s important to remember that there are other sources of traffic beyond Google. This is why some sites choose to use noindex only for Google and not for other search engines. You may choose to direct users to this content through advertising, social media, or CTAs once users are on your site.
An example: A site removed all content from a directory that violated the reputation abuse policy, resulting in a massive drop in rankings over time as Google detected 404 errors.
