For several years now, Google have been advising webmasters to create valuable, original and unique content. One place where this often does not happen is in product descriptions for affiliate sites, which are often copied and pasted from the original manufacturer's website.
Starting from November 2021, it's even more likely that affiliate sites with duplicate content will find their pages disappear from Google's search results - not just penalised in terms of ranking in the results, but actually removed completely from Google Search and other Google websites.
This is as a consequence of the November 2021 Google Spam Update, announced on Twitter via Google's SearchLiaison account on November 3rd:
As part of our regular work to improve results, we've released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search: https://t.co/jK3ArQmTqT
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 3, 2021
So what do Google's Best Practices for Search have to say about websites that participate in affiliate schemes and reproduce the product descriptions supplied by the original manufacturer?
