Back in the day, low-quality, spam-like content was able to work its way toward the top of search engine pages through the magic of keyword stuffing. Thankfully, we’re well past those days. 

Now, if you want to rank highly with Google, you need quality, authoritative content. And yes, you still need keywords — just not a ridiculously excessive number of them crammed into the same 500-word page. 

Put another way, Google does its best to reward helpful, informative content. And it’s constantly updating its own algorithms to that effect.

On the flipside, Google won’t hesitate to penalize sites that attempt to buck the system. And that’s why a major update in November 2024 took the financial content world by storm.

A key Google update caused a world of upheaval in the financial industry

Google updated its site reputation abuse policy to prohibit the use of third-party content to manipulate search results. That update booted a lot of big names in the financial industry out of search results, rendering them virtually unfindable.

Google defines site reputation abuse as a tactic wherein third-party content is published on a host site to take advantage of that site’s established ranking signals. The logic is that on its own domain, that third-party content wouldn’t perform as well without the authority of the host site. 

The key ingredients that trigger the penalty seem to be:

(a) third-party content, including affiliate links, on 

(b) a site owned by a company in an unrelated business or industry

There isn’t a “freelancer” penalty

To be clear, third-party content itself — which includes freelance content — isn’t a violation of site reputation abuse policy. Rather, it’s only a violation when that content doesn’t align with the host site’s content, and when it’s clear that the content in question is being published on the host site simply to boost its rankings.

Say you’re a bank whose website is loaded with content on savings accounts, CDs, and loans. If you were to then host third-party content on gutter cleanings so that content could benefit from your site’s strong search rankings, you’d put yourself at serious risk of getting penalized by Google. 

This is effectively what a lot of the big names did. A big player known for dishing out financial advice got dinged for ranking highly for CBD gummies. arstechnica

Going back to our bank example, let’s say you want to add mortgage content to your site because that’s another product you offer. You could hire a contract financial writer to produce it without issue. That content is relevant to and part of your core business, and you’re not hosting it on your site to get around an algorithm. 

What happened to the high-ranking financial websites?

Following the update, a number of key financial sites were slapped with manual penalties from Google. Those, frankly, aren’t good. 

A manual penalty means your site has been reviewed by a human and determined to violate a search policy. From there, the only way to get back into Google’s good graces — and back onto search results — is to fix the problem at hand. Sometimes, though, it can be tricky to figure out what the problem is exactly, leading to much trial and error. Ultimately, many sites had to take a lot of high performing content offline.

The sites affected included WSJ Buy Side, Forbes, USA Today, CNN, AP News, and many others.

The site reputation abuse penalty is a boon to financial institutions

Google’s site reputation abuse update has thrown a lot of big-name sites off their game. And now, even with taking corrective steps, a number of formerly high-ranking financial sites are no longer sitting atop search results for key terms they once had no problem capturing.

This means that less well-known sites have a prime opportunity to focus on producing robust content that meets Google’s standards for quality. With those big-name sites no longer dominating rankings, smaller banks, mortgage companies, credit unions, and online lenders can finally get their names out there without having to settle for third-page search results.

Google prioritizes quality in content

The emphasis here is quality. Mediocre content is not only bad for business, but bad for search. If you’re looking to capitalize on Google’s update — an update that no longer lets big players throw their weight around — then it pays to invest in informative, authoritative content written by people who know their stuff. 

Google itself says, “Freelance content alone is not a violation of the site reputation abuse policy. It is only a violation if there is ALSO an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.”

Simply put, if you’re a lender that offers home equity loans and HELOCs, and you hire an expert on those products to produce content for you, you’re not going to land in Google jail. If anything, now’s the time to bring in experts who can produce content that’s accurate, credible, easy to digest, and SEO-friendly. 

The big players left a hole that you can fill.

Google has made it clear that it won’t tolerate content that isn’t 100% authentic. Use that to your advantage while your big-name competitors are still scrambling to deal with the aftermath of the penalties they’ve received.