A study titled “Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines” was conducted by Janek Bevendorff, Matti Wiegmann, Martin Potthast, and Benno Stein, researchers sought to address this growing awareness of a perceived decline in search result quality.
Their answer is “Yes.”
Interestingly, even though the quality of search returns was declining the study wound up validating some of basic tenets of traditional SEO.
The research team, spread across Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and ScaDS.AI in Germany, produced a year-long empirical analysis to study how SEO-affiliated content affects the performance of three major search engines: Google (proxied by Startpage), Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Main conclusion; Google is infected with SEO spam
Search results are showing a disproportionate amount of SEO spam content including affiliate links. And it’s getting harder to tell real content from spam, especially with AI-generated content. Even though search engines update their algorithms to fight SEO spam, the improvements are temporary.
The main takeaways outlined by the research team are:
- Search Engines Struggle with SEO Spam
- Prevalence of Affiliate Content is apparent especially in project search returns.
- Amazon Associates Domination in product reviews.
- An inverse Relationship can be seen between the use of affiliate marketing and the complexity of the content.
- The study finds that the text complexity and quality of top-ranking pages might be declining, with trends suggesting simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.
- The continuous adjustments by search engines to combat SEO spam portray an ongoing, dynamic adversarial relationship. SEO practitioners adapt rapidly to algorithm changes, making permanent improvements difficult to maintain.
- Search engine updates do affect the rankings of SEO-optimized content temporarily, demonstrating momentary improvements in search quality. However, these gains are usually short-lived as SEO tactics evolve.
- The search engines display vulnerability to large-scale spam campaigns, especially those involving extensive affiliate links which blur the line between quality content and spam.
AI search is being utilized by end-users to combat the poor quality of major search engines like Google. However, the usage statistics are still quite low.
The study did validate the concept that traditional SEO tactics and metrics do still work:
- Keyword Optimization: The research indicated that higher-ranking pages seem to have a strategic use of keywords, especially in headings and titles. This suggests that careful keyword optimization might influence visibility in search rankings.
- Content Structure: The study showed that pages that rank better are often more structured with a proper use of headings and shorter URL paths, which could signal higher content quality to search engines.
- Text Complexity: Interestingly, the research observed that top-ranking pages tended to have lower text complexity, which might infer that simpler, more straightforward content could be more favorable in search rankings.
Frequent Content Updates: The study noted fluctuations in rankings in response to search engine updates. This suggests that continually updating content to align with the latest SEO trends could be a tactic to maintain or improve rankings.