You're not alone. Google search is getting worse. A new study by Leipzig University, Weimar Bauhaus University, and the Center for Scalable Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence examined Google's search quality over a year and found that the company is losing its battle against SEO (search engine optimization) spam. It turns out that there is.
The study, first spotted by 404media, “monitored 7,392 product review queries across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for one year” and used queries like “best headphones” to explore search results. The focus on product review queries was because the researchers say these searches are “particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing due to inherent conflicts of interest between users, search providers, and content providers.” Because I felt it.
Overall, the study found that “the majority of product reviews that rank highly on commercial search engine (SERP) results pages use affiliate marketing, and a significant portion of that is pure SEO product review spam. It turns out that there is. Although search engines sometimes update their ranking algorithms to combat spam, the study found that “search engines seem to be losing the cat-and-mouse game of SEO spam'' and “the relationship between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing. It was found that there was a strong correlation between , we are also seeing a trend toward content that is simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated. ”
The study found that “there was an inverse correlation between a page's optimization level and its expertise, indicating that SEO can at least compromise subjective page quality.” Google and its handling of pages is the primary force behind what does and doesn't count as SEO, and Google's guidelines reduce the subjective quality of pages across Google's ranking algorithm. It is an attack on
The bad news is that this situation isn't likely to improve any time soon. Generative AI sites were mentioned once or twice in this study, but only in the past year. The problem is that generative AI is becoming able to completely automate his SEO spam process. Some AI content farms scan human-written sites, use them for “training data” and, after slightly rewriting them, are able to thwart real humans with their more aggressive SEO tactics. .already there people who brag About initiatives using AI”SEO heists” on X (formerly Twitter). The New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, and a class action lawsuit against book publishers names ChatGPT and LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) as “industry-level plagiarists. ” is called. “We're in the same position as tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Most websites don't have the legal ability to deal with the endless wave of automated spam sites enabled by these tools. Google's policy is to “Don't penalize AI-generated content in your results.”
A Google spokesperson responded to the survey, noting that Google is still outperforming its competitors. Look every day. We have initiated concrete improvements to address these issues. The study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, many third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found that Google has significantly higher quality than the others. ”
This post was updated at 6pm ET to include a statement from Google.
