Google spam policies
Short answer: Google’s spam policies list practices such as cloaking, link spam, keyword stuffing, scaled content abuse and hacked content that can lead to lower rankings or removal from results, enforced by automated systems and, as needed, human review. [1][2]
What are Google’s spam policies?
They are the written rules for what Google treats as spam in web search. Google says it detects violations through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action, and that content that violates the policies may rank lower or not appear at all.[2][1]
Which practices are covered?
The table paraphrases the policies named in Google’s document.[1] Read the live page for exact wording and examples.
| Policy | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Cloaking | Showing search engines different content from what users see. |
| Doorway abuse | Creating sites or pages to rank for similar queries that lead users to intermediate pages less useful than the destination. |
| Expired domain abuse | Buying an expired domain and repurposing it mainly to manipulate rankings with content of little value. |
| Hacked content | Content placed on a site without permission, through security weaknesses. |
| Hidden text and link abuse | Placing text or links so that they manipulate search engines but are not easily viewable by people. |
| Keyword stuffing | Filling a page with keywords or numbers unnaturally or out of context to manipulate rankings. |
| Link spam | Links meant to manipulate rankings, such as buying or selling links that pass ranking credit without a nofollow or sponsored attribute. |
| Machine-generated traffic | Sending automated queries to Google, including scraping results for rank checking. |
| Scaled content abuse | Producing content at scale mainly to manipulate rankings rather than help users. |
| Scraping | Taking content from other sites and hosting it to manipulate rankings. |
| Sneaky redirects | Redirecting to show users and search engines different content, or users unexpected content. |
| Thin affiliation | Affiliate pages whose product descriptions and reviews are copied from the merchant with no added value. |
| Site reputation abuse | Third-party content published on a host site to exploit the host’s ranking signals. |
| User-generated spam | Spam added by visitors, such as comment spam or spammy forum posts and file uploads. |
Which policies were added in March 2024?
Google announced new policies on expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse alongside its March 2024 core update.[3] The dashboard shows a March 2024 spam update that ran alongside it for about two weeks.[4]
Are paid links against the policy?
Google says buying and selling links is a normal part of the web economy and is not a violation if the links are qualified with rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored”.[1] Links meant to manipulate rankings fall under link spam; see bad links and disavow.
What should an emergency check look for?
Ask whether the affected pages could be read as doorway pages, scaled low-value content, keyword stuffing, hidden text or unnatural links, and whether anything was injected by a hacker. A hacked site is a spam-policy problem and a security problem at once, and is handled on hacked sites.[1][5]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e “Spam policies for Google web search”. Google Search Central. Retrieved 31 October 2026.
- ^ a b “Debugging drops in Google Search traffic”. Google Search Central. Retrieved 31 October 2026.
- ^ “What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies” (5 March 2024). Google Search Central Blog. Retrieved 31 October 2026.
- ^ “Google Search Status Dashboard: Ranking”. Google Search Central. Retrieved 31 October 2026.
- ^ “Security Issues report”. Google Search Console Help. Retrieved 31 October 2026.