Industry reports speculate that search giant Google may have imposed a penalty on SEO company Forbes Advisor, greatly affecting the site's rankings.
This may be attributed to a series of blog and social media posts from SEO expert Lars Lofgren over the last month that referred to the Forbes-affiliated platform as a "parasite."
Lofgren's blog post detailed the story behind Forbes Advisor, which operates under the official entity known as Forbes Marketplace.
The new company, managed by an outside entity unrelated to Forbes, was established in 2020 to run the brand's SEO affiliate business.
According to Lofgren, after the company made itself appear to look like a part of Forbes, it began to exploit "every last corner" of Google, growing at a rapid pace and eventually outranking links from more reliable sources.
A site's reputation score contributes to the perceived reliability of the link. In turn, links with higher scores tend to rank higher in search than those with lower scores.
Experts Speak on the Drop
Lofgren's blog post made rounds in SEO circles, which may or may not have contributed to the significant drop in Forbes Advisor traffic just days later.
A recent tweet from SEO consultant Glenn Gabe reported the massive drop in viewership following what was most likely a manual fix from Google.
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
According to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, Google's site reputation abuse policy does not follow an algorithm.
Further information from Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan confirms that the site's reputation abuse policy will be manually enforced for the foreseeable future.
Keeping up with the best SEO practices of 2024 can effectively improve a company's website search engine ranking.
The changes made during Google's latest Core Update underscore the importance of applying these practices and constantly monitoring the SEO space.
