[es7]

Low-quality SEO content marketing has been taking up more and more of Google Search results in the past decade.

Maybe it has always been this way, but anecdotally it feels like it has gotten so much worse in the last few years.

The exception to the SEO spam rule seems to be a small subset of “highly trusted sources”, that at least for medical information seem to be biased pretty heavily towards “don’t say anything that can get us sued.”

I don’t know the best solution to all of this, but I really think that content marketing is getting to a point where it has drowned out actual content. I wish Google would put a downvote button on their search results page that I can click to indicate that a highly-SEO’d result was not actually useful for my query.

[93po]

It's about to become uncontrollably bad. With really powerful artificially generated writing available, spammers will develop it to be indistinguishable from real human writers when analyzed by google's own machines. We're going to have billions of websites that are 100% generated, with content that most humans can't distinguish as entirely generated, and a LOT of it is going to be wrong. It will completely drown out human written content to the point that websites using humans will give up, and there will only be spam left.

[bartimus]

It's always been bad. But Google has always been less bad then other search engines.

Then also you need to ask the right question. Googling something like "Toyota RAV4" will give wildly different results than "common problems with Toyota RAV4".

In this particular case the better question should've perhaps been something like:

"scientific evidence effectiveness lazer bacterial reduction"

[asdff]

There are times when I just cannot come up with the terms to get past the SEO at all and just give up, not knowing the answer or finding the relevant source. It seems like it happens all the time these days. You end up with something like writers block coming up with new ways to frame the question to shake off the spam. The best I can hope for usually is appending site:usuallyrelevantinfo.com to a term but that requires a priori knowing these good sites for a given topic.