News Summary

• "Overall, the study found that "the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.".
• The focus was on product review queries because the researchers felt those searches were "particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing due to its inherent conflict of interest between users, search providers, and content providers..
• We’ve launched specific improvements to address these issues – and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines..
• More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.”This post was updated at 6:00PM ET to add a statement from Google..
• "The study found "an inverse relationship between a page’s optimization level and its perceived expertise, indicating that SEO may hurt at least subjective page quality.".
• The study points out generative AI sites one or two times, but that was only in the past year..