Google updated its Site Reputation Abuse policy on Tuesday, 19 Nov and said that now this policy is defined as “Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.”
Just a day or two after this update Google started to issue Manual Actions for abuse of this policy and in Forbes Advisor (well know on X for parasite SEO) got penalised and was wiped out of Google’s Search Results and site:forbes.com/advisor/ wasn’t showing a lot of pages, as of me writing this its just showing 10 results.
Within hours of Forbes Advisor getting Site Reputation Abuse policy violation manual action, some X (Twitter) users noticed that Forbes swapped /advisor/ with /portfolio/
That mean same content of /advisor/ (which got penalised) became accessible from /portfolio/
Seems like Forbes SEOs moved real quick to make this change (probably to preserve their traffic and ranking) but later it turned out Forbes was doing some testing for swapping /advisor/ with /portfolio/
To my surprise this was actually confirmed by Forbes SEO Jonathan Jones (I never knew that Forbes SEOs were on X)
Jonathan in a quote tweet said “If you actually check the dates in which we did this test they fall outside of when the manual actions and new policy guidance were sent out. I’m not going to pretend I’ll win an argument on X, given how popular right now it has been so far to attack us. But check the dates.”
It was surprising for me to know that Forbes was running this swapping test around the same days they got penalised for site reputation abuse. But turned out swapping test was started by Forbes SEOs before the manual penality.
Forbes SEO Jonathan Jones also said
“Check the dates. When did Google go out with their new policy and therefore handed out manual actions vs when we tested this out. Use ahrefs like you have here. Nothing to do with circumventing any manual action.”
Later on Forbes SEO Jonathan also confirmed that they did swapping for roughly 15 pages as a test.
Also as site reputation abuse policy was annouced by Google back in March and they told us that its going live on 5th May (they did manual actions then and hold on algorithm for this)
I assumed that it might be possible Google is in conversations with publishers who are doing site reputation abuse & perhaps they helping those publishers correct the course! But Forbes SEO confirmed that they didn’t get any heads up from Google about penalty and later clarified it too.
SURPRISED ME! That Forbes didn’t get any special heads up from Google 👀
Given the hate environment for Forbes parasite SEO on X. I appreciate that their SEO came forward to answer questions in such a heated environment.
But still some things seems like a coincidence to me and I’m in doubt!
How come it can be a such a close conincidence of swapping test and their advisor sub folder being penalised?
Because I thought they did swapping because of penality for advisor?
I will update the story if there’s anything NEW!
Leave a Reply