Is Google losing the war against spam? This is what a German study suggests which looked at the relevance of results from the search engine.
“A deluge of poor quality content, particularly on product comparison, continues to drown out any useful information in search results.» It is difficult to present clearer conclusions for this German study which has looked into the relevance of Google results in recent months. Based on the premise that everyone seems to be complaining about the quality of Google searches these days, a research team set out to factually determine whether the search engine’s results are really “Worse and worse“.
Spam at random
As this introductory quote suggests, the answer is approximately “yes, without a doubt“. But this is not just the case for Google. To carry out their study, the team precisely analyzed 7,392 queries on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo before asserting that “the highest ranked pages are on average better optimized, more monetized thanks to affiliation, but present content of lower quality.» The queries analyzed mainly revolved around product tests and comparisons, an extremely popular and competitive category on Google.
“We note that the majority of tests well referenced in search engines use affiliation mechanisms and that a large part of them resort to SEO spam.», Indicates the study. The difficulty in finding attractive content on Google and others is therefore largely due to poor quality sites which focus everything on SEO, without really investing in content production.
AI is unlikely to improve the situation
The study nevertheless notes that the constant changes made in search engine algorithms can occasionally improve the situation, but that this only produces a “temporary positive effect» and that overall search engines are mostly losing out in “the shallot race of SEO spam“. Even more depressing, the situation could get worse in the years to come.
Source : Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines via 404Media
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