It’s not just you, Google Search is getting worse. A new study from the University of Leipzig, the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence analyzed the quality of Google’s search over a year and found that the company is losing the war against SEO spam.
The study, first discovered by 404 media, “monitored Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries,” using queries like “best headphones” to study search results. The focus was on product review queries because the researchers felt that these searches were “particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing due to their inherent conflict of interest between users, search providers, and content providers.”
Overall, the study found that “the majority of product reviews that rank high on commercial search engine results pages (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are product review spam from SEO”. Search engines occasionally update their ranking algorithms to try to combat spam, but the study found that “search engines seem to be missing 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 towards simplified, repetitive and potentially AI-generated content.”
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The study found “an inverse relationship between a page’s level of optimization and its perceived experience, indicating that SEO can harm at least the subjective quality of the page.” Google and its treatment of pages is the main force behind what does and does not count as SEO, and to say that Google’s guidelines reduce subjective page quality is a strike against Google’s entire ranking algorithm.
The bad news is that it doesn’t look like this is going to get any better anytime soon. The study notes generative AI sites once or twice, but that was only last year. The elephant in the room is that generative AI is starting to be able to completely automate SEO spamming processes. Some AI content farms might scan a human-written site, use it for “training data,” rewrite it slightly, and then bypass real humans with more aggressive SEO tactics. There are already bragging people about doing with AI”SEO thefts” to X (formerly Twitter). The New York Times is taking OpenAI to court for copyright infringement, and a class-action suit for book publishers calls ChatGPT and LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) “plagiarists industrial strength.” are in the same boat of tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Most websites do not have the legal ability to take on an endless wave of automated spam sites enabled by these tools. It is Google’s policy to do so not penalize AI-generated content in your search results.
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