Key Takeaways
- Search engine results are deteriorating in quality due to the influx of low-quality content from SEO farms and affiliate link sites.
- Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are all susceptible to manipulation by large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.
- The emergence of generative AI is expected to worsen the issue, resulting in a further decrease in search result quality.
- Despite efforts to combat this issue, search engines seem to be losing the battle against SEO spam.
The Deteriorating Quality of Search Results
A group of German researchers has confirmed what many internet users have long suspected: the quality of search engine results is declining. After a year-long study reviewing 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, the researchers concluded that the internet is increasingly being flooded with low-quality content from SEO farms and affiliate link sites.
The researchers found that higher-ranked pages are generally more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality. They also discovered that while only a small portion of product reviews use affiliate marketing, the majority of search engine results do use this tactic, contributing to the problem of poor search engine results page (SERP) quality.
The Impact of Affiliate Marketing and SEO
The researchers noted an inverse relationship between the use of affiliate marketing and content complexity. In other words, the more a page is loaded with affiliate links and SEO strategies, the worse its quality becomes.
“All search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content,” the researchers wrote. “We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity.”
This finding aligns with the broader expert consensus that search result quality has degraded in recent years as search engines face increasing challenges from sites focused on search engine optimization (SEO) rather than providing valuable content.
The Role of Generative AI
The advent of generative AI, capable of producing low-quality copy instantly, is predicted to further exacerbate the problem. The researchers found that spam domains are still rampant on SERPs, and there’s an overall downward trend in text quality across all three search engines.
The researchers argue that “dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention”. However, how to combat this issue remains unclear, as static evaluation methods used in the study are insufficient to develop a counter strategy.
The Future of Online Search
Janek Bevendorff, a research assistant at Leipzig University and an author on the paper, suggests that search engines should be more careful in selecting what pages to promote, especially if they come from sites that produce high volumes of content.
However, Bevendorff also noted that “banning [affiliate marketing] entirely is probably not a solution,” as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream.
“In the end, it may remain a cat-and-mouse game,” in Bevendorff’s opinion.
FAQs
Q. Who carried out the study on worsening search engine result quality?
The study was carried out by a group of German researchers from Leipzig and Bauhaus universities and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
Q. What is the issue with the quality of search engine results?
The quality of search engine results is declining due to the influx of low-quality content from SEO farms and affiliate link sites. The advent of generative AI is predicted to exacerbate the problem.
Q. How does affiliate marketing impact the quality of search results?
The researchers found an inverse relationship between the use of affiliate marketing and content complexity. The more a page is loaded with affiliate links and SEO strategies, the worse its quality becomes.
Q. What role does generative AI play in the quality of search results?
Generative AI, capable of producing low-quality copy instantly, is predicted to further flood the internet with low-quality content, leading to a further decline in the quality of search results.
