Google Search experience degraded by affiliate marketing, SEO spam, and low-quality

Google Search has been hurt by the rise in affiliate marketing as well as low-quality content that could be considered spam, according to researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

The researchers looked at 7,392 product review queries on search engines Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for a year in order to understand how these platforms deal with content that is artificially optimised to be ranked higher in search results and get more clicks.

“Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content—more than is representative for the entire web according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22. Focussing on the product review genre, we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do,” said the report published this year.

Affiliate marketing allows people, such as social media users, to review/market a company’s products and earn money from others’ purchases of these products. The report said Amazon Associates was the most popular network in this sector.

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The researchers noted that as content aimed to fulfil such marketing purposes, the complexity of media also goes down; this means that content is full of links but has very little value for actual readers or internet users.

Think of generic filler copy about health and wellness written by a chatbot, existing solely to promote some Amazon products being promoted by an influencer. Filled with links and relevant or trending keywords, these pages often fool search engines into showing them first to viewers instead of more useful medical information matching their query, thus degrading the user’s search experience.

“However, we also notice that the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention,” said the report.

The research noted how this new form of “SEO affiliate spam” needs further study as more people try to monetise it, and now with AI tools.