Did Google Hit Fortune Recommends With A Search Penalty Over Site Reputation Abuse?

Oct 23, 2024 - 7:51 am 256 by

Fortune Google Paint Splatter

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:

Fortune Recommends Google Drop Sistrix

Fortune Recommends Google Drop Semrush

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:

Maybe it was hit because of this post on X?

I mean, it seems algorithmic but who knows...

Forum discussion at X.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Web Analytics

Google Analytics Real Time Reporting Broken Again

Jul 17, 2025 - 10:40 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 17, 2025

Jul 17, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google

Google AI Mode Gets Gemini 2.5 Pro & Deep Search For A Fee

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Discover Officially Gets AI-Generated Summaries

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

How The Google Ask For Me Feature Works & New AI Local Calling

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Tests Much Larger Favicons In Search

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google: It's Tempting To Optimize For Tool Metrics; There's No SEO Shortcuts