A strange thing happened last year.
I was working on a project for a client and needed an expert view from a sports science expert.
I applied to Response Source, a popular platform where journalists and PRs seek expert feedback to add to their stories and campaigns (kind of like a premium version of HARO).
The idea is that this is a win-win for both parties. Those working on the story or campaign get access to valuable expert insight, and the experts get a plug (or better yet, a link) to their business.
I was hoping to get some feedback from a nutritionist, trainer, personal trainer or someone with similar qualifications.
Quotations were often submitted by underqualified people, but it is rare for someone to be overqualified. So it was a surprise when one of the answers came from a doctor, a British GP working in London.
The answers to the question about how athletes cope with high temperatures were not remarkable:
“Risks of heat stress disorders among players Elevated temperature causes physiological responses in the body that hinder the health and performance of players. Gamers can suffer from heat stress disorder. The condition is characterized by hot flashes, heat exhaustion and heatstroke.”
Not too vague and not too salesy, and it would have fit the campaign very well, which is an appropriate tone.
I thought it was quite strange that a GP had taken the time to respond. Maybe he was trying to promote a private practice?
I clicked on the link in his profile and it didn’t lead to a home page for a private GP consultation.
Instead, it was the About Us page of an e-commerce website that sold… sex toys.
Doctor Who?
A quick Google search brought me to his name on half a dozen websites that sell everything from CBD oils to vapors to gummies to vitamins.
I did a reverse image search of the headshot (suspected AI smart looking) I had provided and it came up on a website exposing female romance scammers and the aforementioned CBD websites.
In all likelihood, the image had been taken from someone’s Tumblr account once upon a time and was now being used by the scum of the internet for fraud.
In the UK, all practicing GPs must be on the Register of GPs of the General Medical Council. He is publicly searchable and his name is not listed.
Impersonating a doctor isn’t the first thing that comes to mind as a winning SEO strategy, so why does this happen?
First things first: links. They have significant value in SEO. This is what makes digital PR professionals like me work.
They can be especially important trust signals for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) websites, including those selling, for example, vitamins or CBD oils.
And unfortunately, in the very limited scope of link acquisition, it seems to work.
The bogus doctor has gotten a handful of mentions and links in some British national publications that talk about, among other things, leukemia.
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EEAT ethics for YMYL
This entirely fictional GP now advises readers how they can check for themselves the early signs of leukaemia.
This strikes me as a genuine YMYL concern. Morally, it is not a good idea to counsel leukemia patients unless you are medically trained.
“High EAT medical advice should be written or produced by individuals or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High EAT medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and they must be edited, revised and updated periodically.”
You see, this isn’t just about links, it’s also about expertise, experience, authority and trust.
When it comes to YMYL sites, Google expects the highest EEAT standard.
You want to make it clear on your About page who your experts are, why they’re experts, and what role they play in your company, brand, or website.
If all of these are present on the page, off-site trust signals are the obvious next step.
Having a medical expert on your website, one who is also cited in various publications and other reputable websites, is one of the best things you can do to build the EEAT needed to rank your website YMYL.
Google’s Search Quality Evaluator guidelines say that:
“For YMYL information topics, the reputation of a website or content creator should be judged by what experts in the field have to say. Recommendations from expert sources, such as professional societies, are strong evidence of a very positive reputation.”
Google, ironically, is even more explicit about this in its 2019 paper on how Google fights misinformation which says:
“For these ‘YMYL’ pages, we assume that users expect us to operate with our highest standards of reliability and security. Therefore, when our algorithms detect that a user’s query relates to a ‘YMYL’ topic , we will give more weight in our ranking systems to factors such as our understanding of the authority, expertise, or trustworthiness of the pages we present as an answer.”
I reached out to reporter Mason Quah who wrote the leukemia story to learn more about what happened and how a fake doctor made national news:
“Almost all the contacts we used were exclusively by email. I was told to use Answer Source, or a similar tool, to find leads. This is the most likely source.
I’m not entirely surprised that an AI could fill in the answers since most of the time we knew what our story was going to be and just needed a rubber stamp from someone putting doctor before their name.
Fake doctor, meet fake patient
It’s not just fake experts who cause problems.
The first “E” in EEAT: Experience also has its share of scammers.
Google now recognizes that you don’t need to be an expert in something if you have first-hand experience and understand that this can be valuable.
Although, I don’t suspect that was the motivation behind insider reporter Julia Pugachevsky’s deeply bleak story being tricked into interviewing an AI-generated source. He is not a fake doctor, but a fake cancer patient.
This was perhaps the most unethical example of black hat link building, with no thought of anything beyond the desired follow link.
Pugatchesky continued write about your experience where we know the source contacted her through HARO. She explained:
“In exchange for her story, I was hoping she would mention her role as the founder of an online gaming page. Ideally, I could link to that as well.”
When Pugachevsky realized she had been scammed, she contacted HARO, who assured her that the account had already been banned.
As for my fake GP though, he seems to still be out. At the time of writing, she was last quoted in the press three weeks ago.
Unsurprisingly for Pugatchesky, trust has been damaged.
Just as Google works on trust signals, trust between digital PRs and journalists is crucial for digital PR to take place on platforms like HARO and Response Source.
Pugachesky ended his piece by explaining what he would do to avoid falling victim to a similar scheme in the future:
“I prepared a document about my experience for the entire editorial staff of Insider. We’re fine-tuning our protocols and being more vigilant than ever about researching sources in advance, insisting on phone interviews and running email communications through a text checker.”
Those of us who contact Insider on behalf of our clients may now find that where an email interview would once have sufficed, that same reporter may now want to speak to a source directly by phone to ensure that not generated by AI.
What can SEO and digital PR professionals do about it?
It is important for us in the industry to call this bad practice for what it is. This is not “grey hat SEO” but a scam.
It paints our industry as not only dark, but rotten to the core. After all, do we really want SEO to be associated with impersonating cancer victims?
If you’re outsourcing your link building efforts, make sure you know exactly what those you’re paying to build links are doing to earn them.
Unfortunately, when these tactics are placed around the web, they can have short-term benefits, but we’ve been here before.
It’s now been over a decade since Google launched the Penguin algorithm and took a strong stance on manipulative link building practices.
According to Google’s own data, it affected about 3% of all search results. So we know that Google is more than willing to penalize inappropriate behavior when it’s highlighted, and to do so en masse.
As Google states:
“Tackling the spread of false or misleading information is central to Google’s mission and ensuring that our products remain useful to the billions of users and partners who use our services every day.
“While we have always fought the efforts of malicious actors to manipulate our systems and deceive our users, it has never been more important to thwart them and ensure that we provide our users with information worthy of their trust our services”.
In this case, it makes a lot more sense to clean up our act as an industry rather than await the wrath of a devastating Penguin 2.0-style Google update.
What should posts do?
For news publications and the journalists who write for them, there may be a case for continued training as AI evolves. I leave you with this quote from Quah:
“There is a lot of value in teaching people how to conduct research that bypasses AI bots or whatever the next innovation is to occupy the top spot of most Google search queries.
“I would say it’s something you have to actively stay on top of, it’s like how there’s a lifetime of medical knowledge, a doctor doesn’t just keep what they know from school, they spend most of their career continuing to follow the field. and stay current on new techniques and methods. Journalists must continue to educate themselves as the field changes.”
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
