Lo spam SEO, Search Engine Optimization spam, refers to unfair and manipulative practices used to artificially improve the visibility of a web page or a set of them in Search Results (SERP). The practice, prohibited and strongly opposed by Google and other search engines, has the aim of artificially obtaining a higher positioningsurpassing sources that deserve greater visibility.
According to some observers, aggressive SEO has ruined the Web: the result is that today it seems more complicated to find, through the use of search enginefind relevant and authoritative answers regarding the topics of your interest. Danny Sullivandal 2017 Public Liaison for Search, disagrees and has strenuously underlined that “good” SEO, understood as the set of practices used to propose valuable content, is by no means obsolete. Indeed, the introductory guide to SEO created and updated by Google highlights the virtuous activities to be promoted on a daily basis.
The worsening of the quality of results in search engines is a fact, according to a group of researchers
After a year of analyzes conducted on the main search engines – Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo – a group of German researchers explains that it is not an impression: the quality of results of searches would actually get worse. I study “A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines” represents the first review on the quality of the results proposed in the SERPs.
After examining thousands of product review queries, the team concluded that better-positioned pages are more optimized on average and even show a lower text quality.
The researchers also highlighted that all three search engines under investigation would be susceptible to manipulation, the result of spam campaigns on a large scale. Efforts to counter such activities through algorithmic updates they appear to have only a “temporary positive effect”.
Fingers pointed at low-quality, mass-produced content
Although Google said in 2022 to optimize its ranking algorithm to give priority to “people-focused content“, researchers argue that the efforts appear to have been in vain: SEO experts and “spam factories” have simply learned to evade the latest changes to the system. With the advent ofGenerative AIFurthermore, more and more subjects are capable of instantly generating low-quality copies. At the same time, the study reads, “the line between benign content and spam is becoming increasingly blurred; a situation that will certainly worsen with the ever-wider diffusion of generative AI“.
Janek Bevendorffprofessor at the University of Leipzig and author of the document, stated that it is difficult to say whether there is a useful solution to effectively counter the situation faced by online searches today.
According to Google, the study in question focused only on the contents of the product reviews and would not reflect the overall quality and usefulness of the Research for the billions of queries that the Mountain View company processes every day. A Google spokesperson added that the company has introduced specific improvements to combat the phenomenon of SEO spam, so much so that the same study observes how the search engine – in the last year – has still provided better performance than the others.