'We're all working for Google': Media outlets are purging freelancers to try to fend off search declines

• Publishers like Dotdash Meredith and Forbes are taking big steps to counter a Google crackdown.
• Google targeted what it considered spammy content, which impacted many product-review articles.
• Dotdash Meredith and others cut ties with some freelancers and scrubbed their articles.

Freelance writers who worked with digital media companies like IAC-owned Dotdash Meredith and Forbes are feeling the pain as outlets take extreme measures to prevent Google from squeezing their traffic.

Google began cracking down last year on third-party material provided to publishers that it considered spammy and designed to take advantage of reputable outlets' search authority. The move affected some freelancer-written product review articles and coupon pages.

In response, Dotdash Meredith and Forbes cut ties with some freelancers and assigned their own staffers to rewrite freelancer stories, according to multiple people at each outlet and documents seen by Business Insider. Freelancers who worked for third-party companies that supplied content to publishers — including Credible and Forbes Marketplace, an entity partly owned by Forbes — were often identified as high risk.

A third publisher, CNN, stopped using Forbes Marketplace to source review articles for one of its verticals of its review section, CNN Underscored. CNN said that while it's still using a core group of freelancers across its verticals, it stopped them from appearing in Google searches by de-indexing them. This will make those articles less discoverable but potentially avoid Google's wrath.

One former Dotdash Meredith freelancer said it was "shocking" to see their articles disappear from one of the company's sites.

"I understand the state of the business, but it's definitely affected me," this person said of being cut off by the company.

Two Dotdash Meredith staffers told BI that some employees on editorial are holding their noses as they re-create articles originally written by longtime freelancers.

"I'm rewriting other people's work, which feels gross," one of the editorial staffers at Dotdash Meredith told BI. "We're all working for Google."

A Dotdash Meredith spokesperson didn't comment on the rewriting but said it continues to work with freelancers, and a Forbes spokesperson said it had updated its strategy to "include bringing more of our testing and writing in-house for both Forbes Vetted and Forbes Advisor."

Google said in a statement that site reputation abuse leads to a bad search experience and that freelance and affiliate content are not policy violations in their own right. It also said the company isn't targeting freelancers by name.

The Google changes hit what had been a rare bright spot for the digital media business: affiliate revenue. In this model, a website earns a commission when someone clicks and buys a product based on an article or coupon.

Many publishers relied on freelancers to write much of this content or even outsourced it entirely to operations including Forbes Marketplace, or in the case of coupons, companies like Global Savings Group and Savings United.

"Publishers are going to great pains to show the Google algorithm the content is being produced in-house — it's all being done by fully employed staff," said Jeff Li, who was Time digital GM through 2024 and is now consulting to publishers.

Dotdash Meredith is taking a hard look at its operations

Google's crackdown is a particular problem for Dotdash Meredith, which owns a portfolio of service sites like Allrecipes and Investopedia.

Dotdash Meredith built its business on its ability to answer surfers' questions and rank high in search results, making it the envy of many in the publishing world. Affiliate revenue has also been a fast-growing area for the company, though it has been trying to decrease its reliance on Google by directly connecting with audiences through methods like emails, social media, and live events.

Late last year, Google notified Dotdash Meredith that some of its sites violated Google's spam policies, two of the insiders said. Since then, Dotdash Meredith has been reducing its use of freelancers who have a history of working for other publishers it believed to be Google targets. It's also been unpublishing their articles and reassigning them to in-house staff, according to three insiders and documents seen by BI.

Dotdash Meredith regularly prunes old, out-of-date material from its sites. But in this case, it's removing relatively new articles.

One staffer estimated, based on internal documents, that at least 100 freelancers across Dotdash Meredith properties had been affected. Another said they were told to "ghost" people rather than inform them directly of the change in strategy.

"There's a real story in how these policies of Google's have the potential to ruin freelance journalists' lives within a blink of an eye," the first staffer said.

The moves extend beyond freelancers.

Dotdash Meredith is removing the bylines of some of its in-house recipe developers who work on multiple of its food sites and moving their names to the bottom of the recipe, according to two insiders and documents seen by BI.

It has also considered limiting writers to just one brand to minimize the appearance of their names, and having writers use pseudonyms, these people said.

Google's algorithm is a black box

The measures show just how much is at stake.

Many publishers have been challenged in recent years as social media traffic has fallen. That's made ranking highly in Google search paramount. But Google's algorithm that determines search results is a black box and is based on many factors, which makes it hard for publishers to isolate the impact of any one action they take.

Dotdash Meredith's biggest recipe sites weren't affected by Google's spam crackdown anyway, according to data shared by Lily Ray, an SEO specialist at Amsive, a performance marketing firm.

There are also signs the tides could be shifting.

Publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Forbes, started to see traffic to their product-review sections tick back up in March after a period of decline, according to data that multiple SEO analysts shared with BI.

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