Did Google Impose a Search Penalty on Forbes Advisor Due to Reputation Abuse?
Google may have imposed a manual action on Forbes Advisor, leading to a decline in its search rankings due to potential violations of the site reputation abuse policy. Lars Lofgren discussed this situation in his article "Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host," published on September 18. Shortly after, Forbes Advisor appears to have experienced a significant drop in search performance.
Lofgren explained that in 2020, a separate company partnered with Forbes to manage its SEO affiliate business, creating a new entity that falsely presented itself as part of Forbes. This entity is known publicly as Forbes Advisor, but the official name is Forbes Marketplace. He highlighted the rapid growth of Forbes Advisor in Google Search.
Following Lofgren's piece, Glenn Gabe shared two charts illustrating a swift decline in traffic just days later. He noted on X that the decline could be linked to either recent updates in Google's spam policy or algorithmic shifts following the August core update. Gabe remarked, "I'm 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've seen since the August core update completed, but Forbes Advisor is dropping heavily as of yesterday. 1.7 million queries have dropped in rank (or are lost). Again, I have no idea if this is a manual action or algorithmic, but the timing is intriguing."
The following day, he provided further analysis, stating, "Based on the 9/25 drop of Forbes Advisor, here are several directories within that section of the site. There are some significant declines across health, credit cards, banking, car insurance, and more. I'm not seeing drops across many other sites engaging in similar practices, so it appears to be isolated to Forbes at this point."
It’s important to note that the site reputation abuse policy is still not algorithmic, suggesting this is likely a manual action. Google began enforcing this policy back in May. When I spoke with Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, he indicated that the enforcement of the site reputation abuse policy will remain manual for the foreseeable future.
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