New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What can Google realistically do to fix AI-driven SEO tricks?

Ask HN: What can Google realistically do to fix AI-driven SEO tricks?
3 by eigenvalue | 3 comments on Hacker News.
This tweet has been making the rounds recently, with most bemoaning how things like this have quickly made search almost useless now: https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032639402037610 But spammers are going to spam, and as long as there is a strong financial incentive to game the system, it's going to happen more and more. So assuming we are stuck with this kind of behavior, what can Google pragmatically put into place to minimize the impact on organic search ranking? Some ideas off the top of my head: - Specifically look to detect this sort of thing-- a new website popping up out of nowhere with a huge number of never before seen articles. The articles closely mirror the sitemap of another currently high-ranking website. Analysis of the articles suggests high probability of AI generation (this part is tough obviously). All of this directly leads to banishment from the first 100 pages of results at a minimum. - Give massive preference to pages that have been up continuously for at least 2-3 years. - If you can't find any organic links to the site on places like HN/Twitter/Reddit (where the comments/posts containing those links have at least a few upvotes), then it's probably not a "real" site. - Boosting rankings for content that is clearly attributable to a real person whose existence can be verified in various ways (the same way you might look up who the poster of an HN comment is IRL). I feel like this is absolutely a solvable problem if they take quick, decisive action. At the very least, they could try to minimize the impact. Otherwise search really will become useless and we will lose a very powerful tool.

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