Google, the most trusted name in internet search, dominating over 90% of all searches done online, boasting over $300 billion a year in revenue, driving trillions of dollars in income to businesses all across the world. But are the results actually trustworthy, or has the rise of AI-generated search spam caused Google’s results not only to be unhelpful, but actually dangerous?
So armed with my notebook and my list of websites that are dominating millions of keywords on Google, we’re going to head to the backyard office and show you exactly what’s going on. First, let’s take a look at what people are saying about the Google spam problem.
According to Wired, Google’s finally trying to kill AI clickbait. Another report from Fortune says, “This is the worst quality results on Google I’ve seen in my 14-year career.” And after having made money using Google search for over 25 years, I can say without a doubt that this is the worst I’ve ever seen. Reddit is talking about how the spam is insane on Google, and The Verge says they’re starting to squash more spam and AI in search results. But is that the truth? Well, let’s have a look.
On YouTube, you can see many creators talking about how their sites got de-indexed or lost tons of rank in the latest Google core update. Does this mark the beginning of the end for Google search? I mean, even the Search Engine Journal is saying that the AI spam sites are winning. And in just a minute, I’m going to show you what they look like, what you need to avoid, what not to click on, and how this whole thing’s going to play out, because let’s face it, there’s a ton of money at stake here.
In fact, if you were to take a look at the keyword “Amazon jobs,” which is looked up on Google almost 500,000 times a month, you can see that this keyword is worth a lot of money. In fact, if you were to write a good article about how to get a job at Amazon, ranking in the top three results for this keyword could be worth $100,000 a month or more. But what is a helpful quality article anyway? Let’s take a look at what Google thinks.
Here we have amazon.jobs. That seems pretty legit. Some government stuff over here, hiring Amazon, a couple of local job listings. And then we can see sites like m.de. This one was put up just 3 hours ago and is already in front of over a half a million people a month. And that’s just on one keyword. And if we click the link, we can see that my virus software quickly shows a warning. But don’t worry, I’m going to fire up my Linux machine, we’re going to click on these, and get to the bottom of what’s actually going on, how they’re scamming people, the dangerous things they put on their website, and ultimately how they’re making money.
If we were to take this domain name and put it in a keyword tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or any other keyword tool, we can see that they rank for over 25,000 keywords in Google, some of them generating up to 8.5 million searches a month, with a super high competition value. If I was to start out with a website and try really hard to rank for this keyword with good content, it’s going to be pretty impossible. Yet this website with AI spam content ranked in like 3 hours. And we can see sites like this popping up everywhere, ranking alongside gigantic sites like Walmart, USPS, FedEx, Amazon, and more.
And here’s where it gets interesting. I actually took a list of about 50 different websites, and I found that only half of them were actually caught by Google so far, which means most of them are actually ranking, getting traffic, and living at the top of Google search results. We could see here, some of them are ranking for like 3 million keywords, 2 and 1/2 million, 2 million, and on and on we go, literally hundreds of millions, if not billions, of keywords being outranked by spam, garbage, and malicious sites designed to harm your computer, steal your passwords, and ultimately, money.
And before, in order to do this, you needed to have a domain that had a lot of history, a lot of backlinks pointing in, and lots of power in the Google search results. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with the new Google Update. In fact, some of these websites were registered just days ago. This one’s 15 days old, and this one here, ranking at the top of Google, is less than 2 days old. So they literally got a new domain name, and now they’re ranking for over 184,000 keywords. Yeah, this is crazy.
And what we’re learning here is that search engine ranking and search engine optimization is a huge business. In fact, this is one of the ways that I’ve made money over the past 25 years, creating content, getting it listed on Google, getting traffic, and pointing to affiliate programs, my own products, and different things that make me money. It’s actually pretty simple. And if you want to learn about it, don’t worry, I’ll have some links in the description. But again, we don’t want to do what these people are doing, trying to game the system and put junk out there just for financial gain.
No, we want to focus on good, legitimate niche websites, like this one here that ranks for all different kinds of keywords about different types of tools, how they work, what batteries they use, and on and on we go. In fact, if you were to rank for “best gas leaf blower,” that’s a keyword that gets over a thousand searches a month, and these are people that want to buy products, which means you can make a lot of money. And I’ll put some videos in the description about how to do ethical SEO marketing and make a living writing good content with AI.
But first, let’s take a look at what’s actually on these websites, see why they’re ranking, and why they’re harmful to your computer. Okay, so testing this out, we’re going to scroll down and look for the first scammy, spammy site, and we’re going to click it and see what it links to. Luckily, I was able to boot this up on one of my old Windows machines that doesn’t have anything on it except for Microsoft Bing Edge. So let’s see how this works.
Here we can see it’s redirecting. It redirected twice, and now it’s going to this “allow to verify you’re human,” which is going to take us to some kind of phishing website or something that downloads to our computer that’s going to cookie stuff or track or put spyware or malware on the computer. Let’s try a couple more and see exactly what’s going on there. Again, another one, we could see that hitting the back button does not let us out. It’s kind of trapping us here and putting us in all kinds of junk malware, spyware, and everything like that.