Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely and attributed the change to a recent update to Google Search policies.
In the last few days, Forbes has said it will stop hiring freelancers to produce content for its Forbes Vetted product review section, according to a journalist who wrote for the site. In a note shared with the edge, an editor in Forbes aforementioned Google “site reputation abuse” policy for the change.
Site reputation abuse, also called parasitic SEO, refers to a website that publishes a flood of off-brand or irrelevant content to take advantage of the ranking power and reputation of the parent site in Google Search. This use is often hidden from users browsing the website. (For example: those strange coupon code sections on newspaper sites that appear through search engines but are not prominently displayed on the home page.) Sometimes this spam content is produced by third-party marketing companies that are contracted to produce a search mountain. -Friendly content.
Forbes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It is not clear what other sections of Forbes the pause extends until. Writer Cassandra Brooklyn described receiving similar news last week.
Many media outlets (including The edge) hire freelancers to write and report stories. But Forbes has an especially large group of external contributors who publish on its site. Many of these writers are legitimate journalists who do fair and in-depth reporting. But there is also he Forbes network of collaboratorsa group of thousands of marketers, CEOs, and other third-party experts who post questionable content under the trust Forbes name.
Some editorial content on the site may have drawn the ire of Google, which has been aiming at the content hose of web search engines. In November, Google further tightened its rules on parasitic SEO, specifically targeting 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 nature of third-party content or the unfair and exploitative nature of attempting to exploit the ranking signals of host sites,” the company said. wrote in a blog post.
Like other testing and review sites, Forbes Vetted Earn money every time a reader makes a purchase using links in media articles. One writer who heard about the pause in freelancing says the editorial process for their past stories was rigorous: They would test products, go through multiple rounds of edits, and interview sources. In addition to the break in work, the writer. He was told that an internal staff member may need to re-report and publish some of his stories.
“They clearly put a lot of resources into Forbes Vetted,” the writer says. “The big product reviews I was doing were costing $3,000 each, which is a huge amount of money to then say, 'Oh, we have to rewrite this whole thing internally.'”
Google's spam policies state that the existence of freelance content in itself does not conflict with the site's reputation abuse policy; It is only a violation if that content is also designed to Leverage Site Ranking Signals. Google spokesperson Davis Thompson directed The edge to a frequently asked questions section describing the self-employed policy.
