Did Google Hit Fortune Recommends With A Search Penalty

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Did Google Hit Fortune Recommends With A Search Penalty

Google may have hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty, downgrading its Google search rankings. This may be related to the site reputation abuse policy, like it may have done previously to Forbes Advisor a few weeks ago and some other large publications.

Fortune Recommends is hosted on a subfolder at fortune.com/recommends and is the product reviews arm of Fortune Media. Fortune says it publishes “unbiased research and information on the products and services readers use every day to make their lives better.”

It seems the site got hit around October 11th, as per Glenn Gabe who documented the hit in a post on X. Glenn wrote, “now Fortune Recommends is dropping heavily as of October 11th. And it’s a BIG drop in search visibility. I’m seeing close to 400K queries drop in position with many completely lost.”

Here are two charts, one from Sistrix and the other from Semrush, I believe:

Glenn asked, “is it a manual action for Site reputation abuse, or is it algorithmic like it seems for Forbes’ affiliate content? Only Google knows. Muahahaha.” Very true.

As we previously covered, 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.

Google also updated its spam guidelines a few weeks ago and added more detail about site reputation abuse.

Here is Glenn’s post:

I’ve already covered how Forbes Advisor and APNews Buyline both dropped heavily, but now Fortune Recommends is dropping heavily as of October 11th. And it’s a BIG drop in search visibility. I’m seeing close to 400K queries drop in position with many completely lost. So, is it a… pic.twitter.com/ACBR2S1pVX

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 22, 2024