Google refreshed its rule on borrowed-reputation content

You added a "deals" section a while back, or you let a partner publish articles under your domain, or someone pitched you a paid post that lives at yoursite.ca/blog/their-thing. It ranked, everyone was happy, and you forgot about it. On 2026-08-28 Google Search Central posted an update to the policy that governs exactly this arrangement — and it is worth knowing whether anything on your site now falls under it.

What the policy is actually about

Google introduced its site reputation policy in 2024 to stop a specific practice: publishing third-party content on a trusted website just to exploit that site's good reputation to rank higher in Search. Google's words. The concern is that a page climbs not because it is good, but because it is sitting on a domain that earned trust for other reasons. Google says this hurts search quality and creates a bad experience for users.

The August 2026 post is an update to that policy. The exact wording of what changed is in the source, and I am not going to paraphrase specifics we have not read line by line — open the Search Central post and read the update section itself before you make any changes.

Is anything on your site exposed

The pattern Google cares about is content that isn't really yours, sitting on your domain, ranking on the strength of your domain. Walk your own site and sort what you find:

The dividing line Google draws is intent and involvement: is this here to serve your readers, or purely to borrow your domain's authority? A wall of syndicated third-party pages you never look at is the risk. A guest article you commissioned and edited is not the same thing.

The one check to run this week

You want a list of every page on your domain that you did not write or actively curate. The fastest way is a site query plus your own memory of who has access.

1. In Google, search site:yoursite.ca and skim for sections you'd forgotten — deals, partner, sponsored, guest, resources.
2. Open Search Console, go to Pages under Indexing, and scan the indexed URLs for subfolders or subdomains you don't personally maintain.
3. For each one, ask the plain question: did I create or edit this, or is it here to rank on my domain's name?
4. Flag anything in the second category. Decide whether to bring it under real editorial control, move it to its own domain, or remove it.

Nothing here is urgent-panic material if your site is ordinary — a plumber with a services page and a blog has nothing to fix. This is for owners who, somewhere along the way, said yes to hosting someone else's content and never looked back.

• Read the 2026-08-28 Search Central update in full.
• Run site:yoursite.ca and list anything you didn't author.
• Check Search Console's Pages report for unfamiliar subfolders and subdomains.
• For each third-party section: curate it properly, move it off your domain, or take it down.

If a page ranks only because of whose domain it sits on, this policy is aimed at it.

Where DIY stops: if a chunk of your traffic or revenue depends on a hosted third-party arrangement, don't rip it out on a hunch. Read the policy, model what removing or restructuring it does to your traffic in Search Console first, and get a second opinion before you break something that pays the bills.