Is the Success of Forbes in Google Search Finally Over?

The End of Forbes’ Reign

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Since 2020, Forbes Advisor has worked tirelessly to manipulate the search rankings in its favor to look as though Forbes is the top expert in a range of topics.

Lars Lofgren summed it up nicely in his expose named “Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host”: “Google has decided that Forbes is the authority in everything. Credit cards, cockroach removal, and getting too high from gummies. Forbes is now the dominant authority in damn near everything.”

And it’s true – I’ve seen Forbes Advisor outrank my own articles for countless website builder terms over the last couple of years, pushing true authorities on the subject down in the SERPs. Not to be bitter, but it’s a tough pill to swallow.

SEO professional Cyrus Shepard shared his thoughts on X:

“Do we think Forbes should rank #1 for “best crypto exchange” alongside “best cbd gummies” along with “best headphones” and 100s of thousands of other “best” keywords?

Does the “brand” of Forbes equate to product expertise?

When we look at these pages, we don’t see the evidence of personal experience and expertise that you [Google] demand of smaller publishers. There’s very little evidence that they’ve actually used many of these products. If we’re being honest, these results seem worse than the “unhelpful” content you fought to reduce. What gives?”

But, the tides are beginning to change and it looks like the Forbes Advisor ship might get caught in the storm.

Has Google Taken Action Against Forbes Advisor?

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Volatility in the SERPs has been high throughout September, despite the August core update completing its rollout at the start of the month. The turbulent landscape could certainly be the cause of Forbes’ changing visibility.

That said, Google recently updated its spam policy documentation to state:

“Close oversight or involvement is when the first-party hosting site is directly producing or generating unique content (for example, via staff directly employed by the first-party, or freelancers working for staff of the first-party site). It is not working with third-party services (such as “white-label” or “turnkey”) that focus on redistributing content with the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.”

Sound familiar? The SEO community believe that Google has finally intervened by taking manual action against Forbes Advisor, in line with its new policy wording. Glenn Gabe shared screenshots on X to show the ranking drops across Forbes:

While this could be good news for niche websites and publishers, it’s still early days so I wouldn’t get your hopes up just yet. Still, from the initial charts, Forbes Advisor is clearly taking a notable hit in the SERPs which could shake things up in the search landscape.

Stay tuned to our newsfeed to see how this story develops.