Forbes is cutting ties with freelance writers, citing Google spam policies

Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely — and has blamed the change on a recent update to Google Search policies.

In recent days, Forbes has said it will stop hiring freelancers to produce content for its product review section Forbes Vetted, according to a journalist who has written for the site. In a note shared with The Verge, an editor at Forbes cited Google’s “site reputation abuse” policy for the change.

Site reputation abuse — also called parasite SEO — refers to a website publishing a deluge of off-brand or irrelevant content in order to take advantage of the main site’s ranking power and reputation in Google Search. Often, this piggybacking is concealed from users browsing the website. (For instance: those weird coupon code sections on newspaper sites that pop up via search engines but aren’t prominently displayed on the homepage.) Sometimes this spammy content is produced by third-party marketing firms that are contracted to produce a mountain of search-friendly content.

Forbes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It’s not clear what other sections of Forbes the pause extends to. Writer Cassandra Brooklyn described receiving similar news last week.

Many news outlets (including The Verge) hire freelancers to write and report stories. But Forbes has an especially wide pool of outside contributors publishing to its site. Many of these writers are legitimate journalists who do fair, in-depth reporting. But there’s also the Forbes contributor network, a group of thousands of marketers, CEOs, and other outside experts who get to publish questionable content under the trusted Forbes name.

Some editorial content on the site may have drawn the ire of Google, which has been targeting the firehose of search engine-first content on the web. In November, Google further tightened its rules around parasite SEO, specifically taking aim at the “third party” nature of this type of content.

“Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host’s sites ranking signals,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Like other testing and review sites, Forbes Vetted makes money every time a reader makes a purchase using links in the outlets’ articles. A writer who got word of the pause in freelance work says the editorial process on their past stories was rigorous — they would test products, go through multiple rounds of edits, and interview sources. In addition to the pause in work, the writer was told that some of their stories may need to be completely re-reported and re-published by an in-house staff member.

“They clearly put a ton of resources into Forbes Vetted,” the writer says. “The big product reviews I was doing were $3,000 a piece, which is a huge amount of money to then be like, ‘Oh, we have to rewrite all this with staff in-house.’”

Google’s spam policies state that the existence of freelancer content in and of itself is not a running afoul of the site reputation abuse policy — it’s only a violation if that content is also designed to take advantage of the site’s ranking signals. Google spokesperson Davis Thompson directed The Verge to an FAQ section describing the freelancer policy.