Google expands its spam guidelines to address a new category of UGC SEO spam, signaling a broader direction for manual actions.

Google takes aim at a new source of SEO spam, signaling that platforms, tools, and services may face consequences for content published by their users. It’s also a warning to SEOs and website owners who leverage these kinds of sites for links and AI search influence.

All three advisories are specific to platforms which means that Google may take actions against these kinds of sites. SEOs who are promoting sites with these kinds of sites should become aware of these policies and the platform owners should also be aware of these new guidelines.

The first change is the addition of a few words that add these sharing platforms as the kinds of sites that the guidelines apply to.

This is the full context, with the newly added words in italics:

“Spammers often take advantage of open comment forms and other user generated content inputs and generate spammy content on an unsuspecting victim site. Hosting platforms and tools that let users publish shared pages, generated content, or web apps may be similarly open to abuse; spammers may create a large number of pages or sites that violate our spam policies and add little or no value to the web.”

Google may be planning to target tool and app platforms that enable users to generate content. SEOs should add this to their site audits to check if clients are using these kinds of sites in manipulative ways.

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