Google Search Experience Degraded By Affiliate Marketing, SEO Spam, And Low-quality Content: Report
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.
Google Search Experience Degraded By Affiliate Marketing, SEO Spam, And Low-quality Content: Report
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.
Google Search Experience Degraded By Affiliate Marketing, SEO Spam, And Low-quality Content: Report
“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.
Google Search Experience Degraded By Affiliate Marketing, SEO Spam, And Low-quality Content: Report
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.
Google Search Experience Degraded By Affiliate Marketing, SEO Spam, And Low-quality Content: Report
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Google Search Experience Degraded By Affiliate Marketing, SEO Spam, And Low-quality Content: Report
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…
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