Your association hosts a job board. It runs on a vendor's platform, it lives at yourassociation.org/careers, and it carries your logo across the top. Somewhere in the same domain there is a sponsored article a corporate member supplied, and a page of industry news syndicated from a trade publication. None of it was written by anyone on your staff. All of it sits on a domain that has spent fifteen years earning the authority it has.
On August 28, effective August 30, Google published the criteria it uses to decide whether that arrangement is fine or a problem. The coverage has been almost entirely about a carve-out for European users, which does not affect a US association at all. The part that does affect you is the section Google added to its spam policy documentation, which it says applies globally.
What the Policy Actually Targets
The policy is narrower than its name suggests. Google defines it as applying where third-party content is published on a host site mainly because of that host's already-established ranking signals, earned primarily from its own first-party content. The operative word is mainly. Hosting content you did not write is not a violation. Hosting it in order to borrow your own domain's reputation is.
Google lists what does not count, and the list is reassuring. Wire service and press release sites. News publications syndicating news from other news publications. Sites designed to carry user-generated content, such as forums and comment sections. And, more broadly, content where the purpose is to share it with readers rather than to manipulate search rankings.
The Four Factors
What Google added is a description of how it decides. The stated question is whether content is created with sufficient input, editorial oversight or contribution from the host site to be considered fully integrated with the main site. Four factors go into answering it:
- How the content is presented. Whether the graphic design, formatting, typography and interface are consistent with the rest of the domain, or whether the section is visibly a different product wearing your logo.
- The quality of the content. Whether there are quality problems on those pages that do not appear anywhere else on the domain, suggesting a departure from your own standard.
- Its stated or implied authorship. Whether there is an explicit acknowledgement of who owns the content and who is editorially responsible for it.
- Whether it appears elsewhere. Whether the same content is published on multiple other sites in identical or near-identical form.
Google is explicit that no single factor decides it. None of the four is necessary or sufficient on its own. That matters, because it means a job board running on a different CMS is not automatically a problem, and a disclosure line by itself is not automatically a defense.
The Examples Are the Useful Part
Google published three worked cases, which is unusually concrete for a spam policy document. Two of them describe arrangements it would not act on, and the pattern across those two is the closest thing to a specification anyone is going to get.
A coupons section, and Google would not act. A publisher runs a deals section with a specialist partner, on a different CMS, in a subfolder. Google says it is unlikely to act, and the reasons it gives are the whole lesson: the section is fully integrated into the homepage, there are disclaimers identifying the publisher as editorially responsible in collaboration with a partner, and there is enough curation to show a differentiated joint editorial effort. Different CMS, different vendor, still fine.
A freelancer's cooking section, and Google would not act. A news site adds a cooking section with affiliate links, written by a freelancer interviewing guest chefs. The freelancer is named. Editorial responsibility is stated. The same freelancer writes for other publications, and Google says that is still fine, because the selection of interviews and recipes is specific to this site.
An unattributed affiliate article, and Google would act. A business publication hosts an article linking to a marketplace selling CBD oils. No author is identified and no responsible editor is named. It does not belong to any thematic section, and there is no link or menu path to reach it from the main page. It duplicates content the marketplace already publishes. Google says it would likely take action.
Where Association Sites Sit
Three kinds of borrowed content turn up on almost every association domain. They land in different places against these criteria, and it is worth being honest about which is which.
The job board is the one to look at first. A white-label board is the coupons example almost exactly: a partner's product, a different CMS, a subfolder on your domain. The coupons example passes because of integration, named editorial responsibility and curation. A typical association board has none of the three. It is reachable only from a nav item, nobody is named as responsible for it, and the listings are syndicated to every other board in the industry in identical form. That is the same structure Google approved, missing the specific things that made Google approve it.
Sponsored and corporate member articles depend entirely on how they are handled. A partner piece that names its author, discloses the commercial relationship, sits inside a real section of your site and was edited by someone at the association looks like the freelancer example. The same piece published verbatim from the sponsor's own website, with no byline and no disclosure, reachable only by direct link, looks like the CBD example.
Syndicated industry news is the one most likely to be fine. Google explicitly carves out news publications syndicating news from other news publications. An association is not a news publication, so the carve-out does not automatically cover you, but the stated purpose test does most of the work: if you are republishing sector news because members want it in one place, that is sharing content with readers. Framing and attribution still matter, but this is the least exposed of the three.
What to Actually Do About It
Nobody needs a project here. What is worth doing is an inventory, and it can be built in an afternoon from things you already know:
- List every part of the domain you did not write. The job board, the sponsored posts, the syndicated feeds, any partner microsite living in a subfolder or on a subdomain.
- For each one, answer the four questions. Does it look like the rest of the site. Is anyone named as editorially responsible. Is the commercial relationship disclosed. Does the same content exist elsewhere word for word.
- Check that it is reachable the normal way. Integration in Google's examples means the homepage and the navigation, not a URL that only works if somebody sends it to you.
- Fix the cheap ones first. A named editorial owner and a disclosure line cost nothing and address two of the four factors. Duplication is the expensive one, because it usually belongs to the vendor's syndication model rather than to you.
A Necessary Caution
No association has been penalized under this policy that we are aware of, and nothing here should be read as saying your rankings are at risk. This is a criteria document, not an enforcement wave. The reason to read it now is that Google rarely publishes the specific factors behind a judgment call, and when it does, the sensible response is to check your own site against them while nothing is wrong, not to wait and see whether something goes wrong first.
It is also worth naming where the risk actually sits. The vendor selling a white-label job board carries none of this. The syndication that makes their product cheap is the same syndication that shows up as near-identical content on your domain. You hold the ranking signals. They hold the content model. That asymmetry is not a reason to drop the board, but it is a reason to ask them what they have changed since August 30.
Have Us Audit What You Host
Send us your domain and we will inventory every section of it that somebody else wrote. You will get back a written page listing each one, how it scores against Google's four published factors, which gaps are a five-minute fix and which are structural, and what to ask your job board or content partner to change. If the answer is that everything you host is properly integrated and attributed, the page will say that, and it is worth having in writing before someone asks the question at a board meeting.