Koch Equity Development, of the US, is reportedly in talks to acquire Forbes from its Hong Kong-based, 10-year owner Integrated Whale Media Investments. Koch is said to be collaborating with India-born media entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia. The deal – if it completes – may value the publisher some 10% below its $630mn price tag in 2021. The Forbes family retains a 5% stake in the 107-year-old business magazine brand.
But it’s not quite so simple. There’s an interesting dimension to Forbes which has been captivating SEO media this past week.
Let me explain.
Forbes has long had a very healthy traffic and revenue stream from affiliate content. Most of it lives under the “Forbes Advisor” area of the site, but also under Health and Homes + Gardens. They have been, arguably, the most successful single domain practitioner of affiliate revenue, driving editorial content, and its given them a significant revenue streams on top of digital ads.
This is not business news content – it’s buying guides for everything from physical products (consumer tech) to software and even health supplements. the growth of which has been described as “stratospheric.”
The context for alarm is that Google has, over the past 18 months, been cracking down on so-called “domain leasing”, where publishers work with third parties, typically to provide things like discount voucher content. Earlier this year, many sites (including those of publishers) lost a lot of this traffic because Google wanted evidence that they were involved in the creation of this – and not simply “lending” their domain to a third party for revenue share.
Which brings us back to Forbes.
The site had seemed to be immune to the Google crackdown, presumably because the content was generally well-produced and looked outwardly as if it was the product of a division of Forbes itself. It ticked all the Google boxes on content quality, authorship and was well-optimised. But, while many SEO specialists have long suspected that Forbes was working with a third party to produce this content, they couldn’t prove it.
Last week, that all changed.
A blog post emerged from one SEO analyst which blew the Forbes ‘camouflage’ apart. Using a combination of code and site analysis, LinkedIn sleuthing and some SEC filing research, the analyst uncovered that, in fact, a third party was producing all the Forbes eCommerce content, and very successfully masking it to prying eyes, including Google’s crawlers. There have since been a number of follow-up posts about Forbes and linking other big news domains to this, including CNN.
A few days after the blog post emerged, Google changed their published guidance on spam content. Then, over the last weekend, it began what looks like targeted action against Forbes. This is where it overrides the algorithm and penalizes a specific site; in this case, only the sections of the site containing the relevant content.
Since Sunday, Forbes is believed to have lost substantial search visibility. This data is widely available using third party tools and is an accepted barometer of a domain’s SEO health. The main provider (Sistrix.de) seeems to show that traffic on the “Advisor” area of the Forbes site is down nearly 50% since Sunday.
