A recently published research paper looked at whether Google Search, as well as Bing and DuckDuckGo, search quality has improved over the past year. The study analyzed 7,392 unique search queries, usually in the product reviews category, where they removed search results every two weeks between October 26, 2022 and September 19, 2023.
The study. You can download the study as a PDF document here, was published by the University of Leipzig, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI in Germany. The study concluded “that dynamic spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention.”
Are search results getting worse? The study aims to find out if search results are getting worse. And the study concludes that with Google specifically, search results “seem to have improved” to some extent from the start of the study to its conclusion. But the study said it requires constant, algorithmic updates. They wrote, “that search engines intervene and ranking updates, especially from Google, have a temporary positive effect, although search engines seem to be losing the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam “.
“Google began downgrading at least some affiliate pages in the last two of our scraps, beginning in late August 2023,” the study added. But the study wrote, “Whether this is a short-lived change or a lasting trend remains to be seen.”
The study concluded, “that top-ranking pages are, on average, more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality.” Adding that “search engines measurably target SEO and affiliate spam with their ranking updates.” “Google’s updates in particular are having a noticeable, but mostly short-lived, effect. In fact, Google’s results seem to have improved somewhat since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of spam of affiliates. However, we can still find several spam domains and we also see a general downward trend in text quality across all three search engines, so there is still a lot of room for improvement,” they added .
Update of the latest reviews. The study did not look at the last review update, which was November 2023. Glenn Gabe pointed this out. This study ended on September 19, 2023.
I think the people running the study should have read my post on the long-term impact of updating reviews 🙂 -> A study monitoring product review queries on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year suggests that search engines are losing the cat-and-mouse game of SEO spam… pic.twitter.com/6E1bu5i3C5
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 17, 2024
Why we care According to the study, it appears that Google’s review update has targeted some of this spammy affiliate review content. But now that Google will no longer confirm review updates in the future, it may be difficult to analyze the effectiveness of those updates in the future.
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