The New Normal.

 By Gisele Navarro of HouseFresh:

"In February 2024, we published an article warning readers not to trust product recommendations from well-known newspapers and magazines ranking at the top of Google search results."

and

I’ll also cover what Google has done since we published our exposé and what they’ve announced they’re going to do. Lastly, I’ll share what happened to HouseFresh over the last two months. SPOILER: It’s not looking good for us."

and

"Within a few days of publishing the David VS Digital Goliaths exposé, I received an anonymous tip from a former Dotdash Meredith employee, who informed me of an SEO content strategy they implement called 'keyword swarming.'

and

“Swarming is about drowning out a competitor,” said the person who reached out. The objective is to “swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority.”

You probably felt it, but now it's official—Google Search results are tanking. And it's not just a hiccup; we're at the beginning of an "enshittification" epidemic with no quick fix in sight. Don't believe me, ask the folks from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI, all three from Germany. (*)

They took a good look at Google search quality, and what they saw wasn't beautiful. Finding useful information on the Internet is turning into a murky mess, and Google doesn't seem to care.

Over a year, these brainy folks kept tabs on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, diving into several thousand product review searches like "best this" and "best that". And guess what? The top product reviews in search results are often swamped with affiliate marketing and SEO spam.

There's this trend toward dumbed-down, repetitive, and maybe even AI-generated content. Not only does this mess with the quality of search results, but it also shows a weird inverse relationship between a page's SEO tricks and its actual expertise.

Don't even get me started on generative AI content farms. They're like SEO spam factories, automating the junk and giving website owners and content creators major headaches. To make matters worse, Google's policy of not penalizing AI-generated content in search results adds fuel to the fire.

The takeaway? Mainstream search results can't be trusted anymore. Money-making schemes have hijacked useful content. This raises a crucial question: Is striving for an online presence even worth it now?

Honestly, it doesn't look great.

Reference

"Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines", a scientific paper written by Janek Bevendorff, Matti Wiegmann, Martin Potthast, and Benno Stein of the Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI, Germany.

HouseFresh disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?