Impact is an automatic estimate of how much a story is likely to
affect one website, weighing who published it, whether Google has
confirmed a ranking change, how many outlets ran it, and whether
the wording implies work on your site. It reads headlines, not
your analytics — treat it as triage, not a verdict.
Incident began at 2026-09-24 09:15 and ended at 2026-10-08 01:00 (all times are US/Pacific).The rollout was complete as of October 8, 2026. Affected products: Ranking
In 2024, we introduced our site reputation policy to stop a practice where third-party content is published on a trusted website just to exploit that site's good reputation to rank higher in Search.…
