Forbes Blocks Its Coupon Directory From Google Before The Site Reputation Abuse Penalty

Forbes has blocked its coupons section of its web site at forbes.com/coupons using an x-robots-tag: noindex directive prior to Google enforcing the upcoming site reputation abuse policy. As a reminder, Google will enforce that new policy on May 5th both algorithmically and through manual actions.

Laura Chiocciora notified me of this change on X saying, “It seems like Forbes put a noindex x-robots-tag on its Coupon folder a few days ago.” I checked the HTTP header for the coupon directory and indeed there is an x-robots-tag: noindex directive now placed on that directory.

Laura showed this chart showing a drop in visibility after Google began deindexing those coupon pages from Forbes:

It seems it was first spotted over here:

This is more wild than I originally thought. @Forbes deindexed several thousand pages! https://t.co/bp7wPkfdyU

— BowTiedWookie (@BowTiedWookie) April 16, 2024

Lily Ray wrote about this after saying Forbes seems to be seeing a double-whammy hit not just from the removal of the coupons directory. Here is that tweet:

Just dug into the data.

The coupon noindexing / traffic drop is separate from this.

This Forbes Vetted situation appears to be an algorithmic hit and nothing to do with noindexing.

Although both things happening at once… yeah, that’s a traffic drop double whammy. https://t.co/qhA1dSJmdD

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) April 20, 2024

As a reminder, site reputation abuse “is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals,” Chris Nelson from the Google Search Quality team wrote. This includes sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users, he explained.

This coupon directory is likely one of the more well-known examples of this in action. By Forbes noindexing it, they should not run into wider issues with this policy. You can learn more about this policy over here.

Forum discussion at X.