Personal Injury Attorneys everywhere will be happy to know that today, November 20, 2024, Google issued manual actions for “Site Reputation Abuse” against Forbes Advisor.
If you’ve been Living under a Rock:
If you’ve been living under a rock, Forbes articles have been ranking in Google’s search results for terms like “Best Personal Injury Lawyers Raleigh NC”.
Forbes Advisor is a section of the site, run by a third party, which has utilized the power of the Forbes website to blast the web with content about travel insurance, credit cards, loans, mortgages, plumbers, lawyers, and more.
Google’s algorithm is too primitive to not rank these pages, making a manual action necessary.
It’s unclear why it took Google employees so long to fix this issue. I brought this to their attention in 2019, and many others more vocal than myself have been complaining as well.
CNN Underscored, WSJ Buyside and many other sites were impacted by this as well.
Here’s what Forbes used to look like in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs):
What Happened?
The news was broken by Glenn Gabe on X.
The manual actions came hot on the heels of Google’s November 19, 2024 announcement: Updating our site reputation abuse policy.
Google now defines “site reputation abuse” 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. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of the main site’s purpose.”
What’s Next?
Nearly all personal injury attorneys now rank 1 position higher in Google’s search results. I personally doubt that Forbes Advisor returns to the SERPs.
