Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands
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Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):
It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:
Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:
Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.
Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.
That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.
Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:
(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)
Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:
https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/
In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:
One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.
A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "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."
Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:
The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.
Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.
This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:
There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:
The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:
https://moneygroup.pr/
Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:
https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/
All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:
As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.
A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).
Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:
Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.
Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.
As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:
As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.
All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.
Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:
This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:
We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:
Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:
Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:
But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.
It cheated.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Oooh "core update" directors cut, please? First time I read it was a critical hit.
If this is too broad, maybe how you handled hinting at Ilya's equal level of obsession but from Shane's pretty oblivious pov? But truly anything about the process would be interesting!
thank you friend! this got long i'm sorry, i hope this is what you were looking for. disclaimer that i dont think my thoughts about a fic deserve any primacy just because i wrote it, death of the author 4ever baby even when she is me
in terms of ilya's equal obsession being hinted at, i hoped that keeping things to shane's very tight, myopic POV would help to obscure ilya's feelings from Shane without obscuring them from the reader. shane is so busy marinating in his own shame that he stays, as you said, oblivious to how hot this all is for Ilya and why it's hot for him. i think shane (in the situationship era timeline of this fic) sees every interaction as requiring winning or losing, so in his mind he loses every time he gives into the urge to think about ilya, when he caves to ilya telling him what to do in bed, etc. this fucks with shane's head even more because it all feels so good to shane, which is anathema to his own work ethic: winning is everything, therefore losing, morally, cannot feel good. only the thing is: it does!* it feels so good, which makes the shame all the more smarting afterwards.
when shane sees that ilya is fucking thrilled about the youtube feed, he interprets this as ilya being thrilled with winning because shane is still stuck in that binary thinking. but i think the reader can see that ilya is turned on and simply happy to be playing, and that shane is unreliably narrating by projecting his own rules onto ilya (and that baby has SO MANY fucking rules).
i think in this fic (and many fics where they aren't communicating with each other openly) the POV character can be very vocal about how they interpret the other character's actions and the POV character's passionate declarations of their own interpretations almost invite the reader to look at what the POV character isn't saying or refuses to see. in this fic, shane is so humiliated (once they're done with the sex, which he loves, which humiliates him further), and he sees ilya "not treating him any differently" after as proof that ilya thinks he "won" the interaction. shane expresses as much pretty plainly. the reader, though, maybe suspects shane is unreliable, and can guess that ilya might be continuing their dynamic as before because he just enjoys the dynamic and wants it to continue........cause they're in love baby! yay!
Thanks for the ask!!! here is the fic btw
*this is because he is not actually losing of course
hello I would love to know your take on ilyas own youtube viewing habits and if they change at all post core update
thank you for this question anon i'm so thrilled you are thinking about ilya from that fic! I would say I see Ilya as being more reactive than Shane. Unlike Shane, he doesn't have a regimented YouTube routine. He's more of a hedonist: when he has a desire he seeks to immediately satisfy it, and then discards it. I think Shane's guilt and shame stem from the fact that he cannot help but probe the root of his desire and stare at the naked stem of it (until, of course, he can cede control of that desire to Ilya). Ilya by contrast focuses only on the immediate sensory feedback he receives in pursuit of his desire and will NOT look at the emotions that might be fueling it. Sometimes that means he'll get turned on and search "Shane hollander best fights" and jerk off (see this excellent post for a compilation of Ilya's faves), but sometimes that means he'll text Svetlana or another hookup to come over.
i do think all of that changes once Ilya sees Shane's YouTube feed and they fuck while watching YouTube highlights. I think he starts texting Shane links to videos of himself, because he's vain and he's obsessed with Shane and obsessed with Shane being obsessed with him. Shane obviously gets squirmy and humiliated about this but does exactly what Ilya tells him to do (confirms the time stamp when he came). Ilya saves every clip of their games against each other to a playlist that completely fucks over his recommended feed. He starts watching videos of Shane constantly--because it's a fun sex game! Because it's hot that Shane gets off on him! It's definitely not because he misses the little gasps Shane can't help but make when Ilya touches him, or the way his eyes get really intense when he's focusing, or because the rhythm of Shane's heartbeat is the only thing that calms his own, or...
If you're looking for other fics in this vein: i just read you're everywhere to me which features Ilya watching a lot of videos of Shane. And of course is it a video is also about film transforming and amplifying desire in a way that broke my brain.
Google March 2026 Core Update: What Marketers Should Do Now
Google confirmed its March 2026 core update began rolling out on March 27, 2026 at approximately 2:00 AM Pacific Time. This comes just two days after the March 2026 spam update completed its rollout in a record-breaking 20 hours. Two major algorithm changes in the span of a week is unusual, and it means organic search rankings are in flux right now. If your business depends on Google for leads, traffic, or revenue, the next two weeks matter. This is not a spam penalty. It is a broad quality recalibration, and understanding the difference will determine how you respond.
What Happened with the Google March 2026 Core Update
The March 2026 spam update launched on March 24 and was fully rolled out by March 25, making it the fastest spam update in Google's Search Status Dashboard history. It targeted existing spam policies (cloaking, link spam, scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse) using evolved SpamBrain systems. No new policies were introduced.
Then, on March 27, Google began the March 2026 core update. This is the first broad core update of 2026, affecting search rankings worldwide across all languages. Google described it as 'a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.' The rollout is expected to take approximately two weeks.
Why This Matters for Your Marketing
SEO and Organic Traffic
Core updates recalibrate how Google evaluates content quality across the entire index. Rankings now hinge on comparative value across competing pages, with stronger emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Sites with thin or derivative content historically see traffic drops of 20-50% during core updates. Sites investing in original, expert-driven content tend to gain visibility.
Content Marketing
The back-to-back spam and core updates send a clear signal: Google is getting more aggressive about content quality in 2026. The spam update specifically targeted scaled content abuse, which includes AI-generated content published at volume without meaningful human editorial input. The core update reinforces this by rewarding content that demonstrates genuine expertise.
Paid Search and Budget Allocation
During core update rollouts, organic rankings become unpredictable. This creates a temporary window where paid search becomes more important for maintaining visibility on critical keywords. If you see organic positions dropping for high-value terms, consider increasing PPC budgets on those keywords as a stopgap while the update settles.
Local SEO
Core updates affect all search results, including local queries. If your business appears in local pack results or depends on 'near me' searches, monitor your GEO and SEO performance closely. Changes to how Google evaluates page quality can shift which pages appear for local intent queries.
E-Commerce and Product Pages
Product pages and category pages are often vulnerable during core updates because they tend to be thin on unique content. Focus on adding original product insights, comparison context, and genuine buying guidance that differentiates your pages from competitors.
Action Plan: What to Do Right Now
Benchmark your current rankings today. Export your Google Search Console performance data for the past 28 days.
Do not make reactive changes. Avoid restructuring pages, deleting content, or making major technical changes during the rollout.
Audit your lowest-performing content. Identify pages with high impressions but low click-through rates.
Check for thin content patterns. Review pages under 500 words and pages with duplicate content.
Review your AI content. Evaluate whether it includes genuine editorial input and unique insights.
Monitor daily, but decide weekly. Check Search Console daily but hold strategic decisions until after rollout.
Document everything. Keep a log of ranking changes by page and keyword.
How I Can Help
I run SEO audits specifically designed to identify vulnerabilities during core updates. That means analyzing your content quality against the pages currently outranking you, identifying E-E-A-T gaps, and building a prioritized action plan based on what Google is actually rewarding right now. Reach out for a consultation at /contact/.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Google March 2026 core update?
The Google March 2026 core update is a broad algorithmic change that began rolling out on March 27, 2026. It recalibrates Google's ranking systems to better surface relevant, high-quality content across all website types and languages. The rollout is expected to take approximately two weeks.
How long will the March 2026 core update take to roll out?
Approximately two weeks, based on historical patterns. The December 2025 core update took 18 days. Monitor progress on Google's Search Status Dashboard.
Should I make changes to my website during the core update rollout?
Avoid making major structural changes during the rollout. Focus on documenting ranking changes, auditing content quality, and preparing improvements to implement after the update completes.
What is the difference between the spam update and core update?
The spam update (March 24-25) targeted policy violations using SpamBrain. The core update (March 27) is a broader quality recalibration based on relevance, helpfulness, and E-E-A-T. The spam update penalizes bad actors; the core update rewards quality.
How do I know if my site was affected?
Check Google Search Console for changes in impressions, clicks, and average position starting March 27. Significant drops (over 20%) suggest the update affected your rankings.
Originally published at mattkundodigitalmarketing.com
Stay ahead of the game with our Ultimate Guide to Google's March 2026 Core Update. Uncover vital insights and tactics to boost your website's rankings now!
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Google’s December 2024 Core Update has brought a renewed focus on content quality and user experience, putting the concept of E-E-A-T…
Google Core Update: Role of E.E.A.T in Dec 2024
Check out this blog to know about Google's recently rolled out core update 2024. See how it again focusses on content quality and user experience putting the concept of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in the spotlight.
