I recently came across an article on Ars Technica that talks about how Google appears to be losing the fight against SEO spam. This is certainly a phenomenon I have noticed not only with Google but also with Bing and Duck Duck Go which is powered by Bing.
If you don’t know what “SEO spam” is, it’s essentially content whose only purpose is to rank high in search results so that people will click on the link and land on a specific website. While the page the user ends up on has to have at least some relevant content to their search query, it is most likely only a fairly useless lure to get them onto the website with the hope that they will click around.
It’s not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
[…]
Overall, the study found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.” Search engines occasionally update their ranking algorithms to try to combat spam, but the study found that “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam” and that there are “strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.”
Ars Technica
The practice frustrates me because you search for something, then end up on some random company’s blog that sells shoes but is writing articles about the latest .NET framework or something entirely irrelevant to their actual business. It is simply a means of catching people not searching for shoes and getting them on their website.
Articles like that tend to be shallow, full of repetitious writing (which search engines seem to prefer due to keyword relevancy) and usually don’t contain the information I’m looking for. It’s basically a lose-lose for everyone since I then leave the website pronto.
Here is a link to the original article on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says
Sadly, it’s a horrid self-serving monster because on those pages are often Google ads, so they are actually paying for the junk to appear, then they Hoover it up and serve it to us. Add “AI” to it, it supercharges the loop, so at some point, search engines will become useless. Who knows? We might return to human-edited directories like Curlie.
I agree. Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. Maybe human-curated directories would be better like in the old days, but of course that runs the risk of too much bias plus the sheer amount of content is overwhelming compared to back in the ’90s. Hard to say what the best solution is there, but it’s clear that the current situation is not it!