Google may have hit Forbes Advisor with a manual action, downgrading its rankings over maybe the site reputation abuse policy. Lars Lofgren wrote about this marketplace, he wrote Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host on September 18th and then a week or so later, it looks like it was hit by a Google manual action.
Lars wrote:
In 2020, a completely different company from Forbes partnered with Forbes to run their SEO affiliate business. They created a new company, made it look like it’s part of Forbes (it’s not), and then went to town exploiting every last corner of Google.They refer to themselves as Forbes Advisor publicly but the official entity is Forbes Marketplace.
He then shared the explosive growth of Forbes Advisor in Google Search.
Then Glenn Gabe shared two charts showing the quick decline of that traffic, only several days after Lars posted his piece.
Glenn Gabe showed on X saying, "not sure if this is related to the spam policy documentation update yesterday (and possible manual actions coming), or if it's tied to the algorithmic tremors we have seen since the August core update completed, but Forbes Advisor is dropping heavily as of yesterday. 1.7M queries have dropped in rank (or are lost). Again, I have no idea if this is a manual action or algorithmic, but very interesting to see timing-wise."
Here is that chart:
Then yesterday he shared more details, saying, "Based on the 9/25 drop of Forbes Advisor, here are several directories within that section of the site. Some huge drops there across health, credit cards, banking, car insurance, and more. I'm not seeing drops across a number of other sites doing similar things yet, so seems isolated to Forbes at this point."
Glenn also sent me a chart of the entire directories trend:
As a reminder, the site reputation abuse policy is still not algorithmic, this does seem to be a manual action, that Google actually started to enforce back in May. But when I spoke to Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, he said the site reputation abuse policy will be manually enforced for a long time.
Here is Lars post:
If you've wondered why Forbes appears EVERYwhere in Google now, it's because it has a parasite SEO program. The whole thing is insane: https://t.co/QqxNcHfQ0D
— Lars Lofgren (@LarsLofgren) September 18, 2024
Here are Glenn's posts:
Based on the 9/25 drop of Forbes Advisor, here are several directories within that section of the site. Some huge drops there across health, credit cards, banking, car insurance, and more. I'm not seeing drops across a number of other sites doing similar things yet, so seems… pic.twitter.com/M6s4Hm0DF6
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 29, 2024
Of course, Google also updated its spam guidelines last week and added more detail about site reputation abuse.
I guess Forbes rode the wave as far as they could...
Forum discussion at X.
