“Google is getting worse” is almost a meme at this point. Go to any forum or subreddit that mentions search results, and you'll find someone complaining that SEO has ruined Google Search.
The joke is on them. SEO has been ruining Google search for 26 years.
I was there for keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farms. The idea that Google is somehow getting worse is a claim I've rolled my eyes at in my official capacity as a marketer and as a consumer.
Only now, marketing news headlines are breathlessly claiming that a study from Germany has Proven The condition of Google is getting worse. See here, here and here.
Like everyone else on the Internet, I want to insist that I am right in the face of evidence that I am not right. So, I went to one of the smartest SEOs I know and asked him who was right.
But first, let's see what the study actually says.
what the data shows
The claim comes from a longitudinal study conducted by researchers at the University of Leipzig, Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI).
“Longitudinal study” is a fancy way of saying they observed variables over time without trying to change those variables.
In this case, they saw 7,392 product review searches on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year. Think about searches like “best headphones” or “best budget bidet.” (Don't judge me!)
Their results show that search-optimized affiliate content is overrepresented in search results.
“We found that the majority of high-ranking product reviews in commercial search engine (SERP) results pages use affiliate marketing, and a significant amount of SEO product review spam,” the report said.
They also found that – perhaps surprisingly – “there is an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity.”
This is a polite way of saying that most affiliate content is bullshit.
Okay, I admit it's not a good look. But it focuses on product search. what are probably associated trash people want When they search for a product. After all, if no one clicks on it, Google will just put something else in its place, right?
What about informational searches?
Search quality on the wider web
“When we're losing, it's not because of spam,” says Amanda Sellers, manager of HubSpot's EN blog strategy. “This is due to occasional authority problems.”
I asked him if hyper-optimized affiliate content was winning over educational searches too.
Until recently, Sellers led the historical optimization team for HubSpot's Blog Network. Their team was responsible for finding out what content ranked better than ours in search engines – and why.
If we were losing to the Allied nonsense, she would be the only one who would know.
Sellers explains that when Google ranks HubSpot blogs low, it's not because the search engine is putting affiliate garbage up. It is more likely that someone else has more authority on that topic.
“In other words, HubSpot is writing about a problem that HubSpot doesn't need to write about,” she says. “Or, at least, where our competitors have a better rapport to write about. Essentially, we're not delivering what the searcher is looking for.”
It seems like Google is getting worse on the contrary, doesn't it? Feeling more confident, I asked Amanda outright if she thought the search had gone bad.
“Has Google Search Got Worse? I have no doubt that's true,” she says. “Especially in verticals that are less competitive and where AI content can rank very easily.”
son of-
“But will it get worse? Maybe that's a really optimistic view—and I'm giving Google a lot of credit—but we are seeing Google taking action. And while they don't always get it right, they are working on the problem.”
She raises a good point. Search results are not set in stone. They change with time. So, did the study show that the change was for better or worse?
SEO over time
The report concludes, “Google results have improved somewhat in terms of the amount of affiliate spam since the beginning of our experiment.” “Nevertheless, we can still find many spam domains and also see an overall downward trend in text quality across all three search engines, so there is still plenty of room for improvement.”
This matches my experience. Link farms worked until they didn't. Keyword-laden content blocked search results until Google detected it.
“Third-party content. content mills,” Amanda adds. “This has been a model for a really long time. That's why we've seen several algorithm updates since August [of 2023] Going forward.”
As long as search engines have a limited amount of space and an algorithm that decides what goes in there, someone will try to game that algorithm. Then Google is going to update that algorithm.
So, is Google getting worse? Answering this, the researchers give possibly the best definition of SEO I've ever heard:
“SEO is a constant battle and we see a recurring pattern of review spam and dropping results[.],
