Google said the March update would reduce spam by 40 percent.
Instead, it’s misattributing photos and articles all over the internet, and pointing them to pure spam sites.
I found dozens of cases on Google image search where the algorithm literally can’t understand what domain my content came from, said David Leiter.
These are all photos I took myself on my travels.
Here’s an example of one of these spam sites Google is sending people to from my photos (warning, the site has a redirect and may be unsafe):
https://we-travel.co.in/2024/04/dhigurah-island-budget-paradise-in.html
The funny thing is, you can try the same searches on Bing and it doesn’t have this issue.
It’s not rocket science, Google!
It should be incredibly easy to look at the date and domain where the photos were first uploaded to the internet and see which one is original, but Google isn’t doing that.
It’s not going by domain authority either.
Most of these are low DA spam sites with redirects.
Some of them may even have malware, but the algorithm thinks they’re canonical.
I’ve spent days trying to get these removed from the internet with takedown requests.
Even if I’m successful, new spam will crop up and Google will elevate it again.
Before March, this wasn’t an issue because the algorithm was smart enough to bury these sites where they’d never be seen.
Now, it’s moving them to the top as ‘hidden gems.’
I raised a similar issue a month ago where low authority commerce sites were stealing my articles and using photos of my wife, while outranking me and being rewarded by the algorithm.
Danny Sullivan never responded to that post, and John Mueller’s response seemed like vague victim blaming (“it’s worth looking at your whole domain”).
I would love to know what could possibly justify Google sending people to these pure spam sites instead of my original articles and photos.
I think there’s a serious glitch in the algorithm.
