A couple of weeks ago Forbes blocked its coupons directory on its website from being crawled by Google. Now Forbes has completely wiped out all the coupons from its site, serving a 410 status code and removing the coupons link from its navigation.
If you try to access forbes.com/coupons, you should get a 410 status code. I also tried to access all the Forbes coupon pages Google has indexed and they all return a 410 response for me and will likely all drop out of the Google index over time.
This is what I see:
This is most likely related 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.
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.
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