Affiliate marketing, SEO spam, and low-quality content are ruining your Google search experience: Report

Google search is being hit by an increase in affiliate marketing and low-quality content that could be considered spam, according to researchers from Leipzig University, Weimar Bauhaus University, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

Researchers looked at 7,392 product review queries on search engines Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over a one-year period to find out which products were artificially optimized to rank higher in search results and get more clicks. Now you understand how these platforms handle your content.

“Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content, according to ClueWeb22’s baseline search system. , is more than representative of the web as a whole. Focusing on product review genres, we found that only a small fraction of product reviews on the web use affiliate marketing, but all searches The majority of results use affiliate marketing,” states 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 the purchases of these products by other users. According to the report, the most popular network in this space is Amazon Associates.

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The researchers noted that media complexity is also decreasing as content is aimed at serving such marketing purposes. This means that the content is full of links but has little value to actual readers or internet users.

Consider common health and wellness filler copy written by chatbots that exists solely to promote some Amazon product promoted by influencers. These pages are filled with links and relevant or trending keywords, often tricking search engines into providing that information instead of more useful medical information that matches your query. It degrades the user's search experience because it is displayed first to the viewer.

“However, we have also noticed that the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms is becoming increasingly blurred, a situation that is sure to worsen with the advent of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention. ” states the report.

The study notes that more research is needed as more people look to monetize this new form of “SEO affiliate spam” using AI tools.