We're making it clear that using third party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site's ranking signals is a violation of this policy -- regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.
We've heard very clearly from users that site reputation abuse - commonly referred to as "parasite SEO" - leads to a bad search experience for people, and today's policy update helps to crack down on this behavior. Site owners that are found to be violating this policy will be notified in their Search Console account.
As a reminder, the site reputation abuse policy is still only enforced through manual actions - it is not algorithmic yet. Google does plan for it to be algorithmic one day.
Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative behavior associated with it.
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