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.
Forum discussion continued at X.
Source link : Seroundtable.com
