Google Search Study Reveals Junk Sites in the Top of Results, Google Says Otherwise

Spam websites and low-quality content are sneaking their way to Google's product search results, according to a new study by researchers from the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, Germany's Leipzig University, and Bauhaus-University Weimar, as reported by Gizmodo.

The study entitled "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines," states that product searches are getting worse for the world's largest search engine as researchers found any type of helpful information is constantly being drowned out in search results by an abundance of poor-quality content, particularly for product searches.

Such inquiries yielded a sizable number of results that were plainly spam-driven search engine optimization (SEO) product reviews.

Mashable adds that, over the course of a year, 7,392 product-review search phrases on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo were examined for this study. The findings were reportedly clear in that the pages with the best rankings are more optimized, have more affiliate links, and have lower-quality material overall.

While it does prove to look bad for Google, the stated paper did, however, demonstrate that there was some improvement in Google results between the beginning and completion of the researchers' investigation.

The study reportedly found that Google outperformed DuckDuckGo and Bing by a large margin. Furthermore, Gizmodo reports that it was informed by a Google representative that the research did not fully depict Google's overall performance.

Google's Response

As per the Telegraph, in response to the research, a Google representative said that it was limited in scope and did not represent the general caliber and usefulness of Search for the billions of searches that Google users encounter on a daily basis.

The report itself notes that Google has improved over the past year and is outperforming rival search engines, and the corporation claims to have implemented specific modifications to address these difficulties.

In a broader sense, the representative stated that several outside parties have evaluated search engine results for various kinds of inquiries and discovered that Google is noticeably superior to the others.

Rampant SEO Spam

Nevertheless, the Germans discovered a general decline in text quality across the three studied search engines. The study maintained a warning that this issue is only going to grow worse because of AI-generated spam.

SEO spam proves to be rampant as Gizmodo reports it continues to be utilized to assist in promoting content. Google reportedly promotes SEO as it provides advice for websites that wish to perform better, with the company's goal being to display the finest, most superior results to users.

However, the report states that junk websites prove to have beaten search engines' algorithms to promote low-quality content as data and studies indicate Google, the search engine industry at large-is facing grave challenges in terms of SEO content.

Most recently, Mashable reports that Search Engine Land claimed Google was hit by a "massive spam attack" back in December 2023, which persisted for many days.