Site Reputation Abuse Fixes

March 4th, 2025

Hello again!

Wow, what a streak—four in a row.

Hope you are enjoying these short, daily SEO missives.

In addition to these, I’m halfway through my latest Rank Theory newsletter on what SEO tactics are working in 2025. It’s long af, but it’s gonna be good. It’ll come out independent of this newsletter (DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS), so sign up here if you want to get that this week or next week.

Damn… I haven’t sent one since November.

Anyway, today’s newsletter is about how to handle content you need to dispose of quickly and you’re all out of rugs and car trunks…

But first:

A WORD FROM MY DOMAIN PORTFOLIO

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Also a bunch of .edu links too, like from MIT, Cornell, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Washington, PSU, etc.

I’m looking to sell this one for $17.5k (negotiable).

Just hit reply if you’re interested and want to learn more.

Content

What to do about site abuse content you need to remove?

The new “Fuck, Marry, Kill,” just dropped for SEO publishers, but it’s called Disallow, Canonicalize, Noindex, or Remove.

That is the title of Glenn Gabe’s new article on how to handle content that’s violating Google’s site reputation abuse policy.

From the article:

I know this particular article isn’t for everyone, but:

1. It’s interesting and looking at the examples can learn you (and there are some GOOD examples in the articles)

2. You never know when you’ll need to reference some obscure SEO article some time in the future when you accidentally were abusing your site’s authority and now you need to fix it

3. Friends don’t let friends incorrectly handle site reputation abuse.

This is a nice tool to have in your tool… desk drawer if you ever get a client with 200 AI articles posted on the same day, looking at them like you’re looking up at a basketball-sized bald-faced hornet nest built just round the corner of your front porch, under the eaves where your old dog likes to sleep in the sun.

Death has already happened, events just have yet to catchup to this inevitability.

I’m always on the look out for things like this that I can tuck away for future work.

Like I said, the article has a bunch of great examples if you’re looking to dig in further. Otherwise, throw this in your notion or whatever so you can pull it up in two years when that client arrives, hornets and all.

~

Thanks for reading!

And thanks to everyone who clicked my poll yesterday. I’m not sure I’ll include anymore polls… it’s weird. 85% of the people clicked three-emoji-star-faces and just a very low number of people clicked weary face or three-emoji-barf-faces… the problem is: I have no idea what to do with this information lol.

A lot of people loved it, cool. Some people hated it. Okay… I’m gonna keep writing about SEO every day in the way I write about SEO so, whatever, sorry I gave you a three-barf-face lol.

Anyway, if you liked this one (or hated it, I guess) hit reply and LMK.

Until next time…

PS — you can sign up for the long form Rank Theory newsletter here.