These are 5 travel blogs, and there are many, many more where this came from.
These sites have tons of obvious first-hand experience, original photography of them at the places they traveled to, lots of evidence of E-E-A-T, etc.
Are there many things they could still improve?
Of course.
But did they deserve a 95% reduction in visibility, akin to sites penalized by Panda/Penguin/pure spam or otherwise rampantly violating Google’s spam guidelines?
Should they truly be treated the same as AI content farms where the “author” has clearly never been to any of the places they write about (spoiler: usually they don’t actually exist), the sites are full of stock photography and aggressive ads, with totally impersonal, generic content, etc.?
Because I have been looking closely, obsessively at these sites for months, and there is a meaningful difference between the actual travel human bloggers and the AI spam, although it now sort of feels like Google’s algorithms are not able to determine that important difference, said Lily Ray.
Are we witnessing a case of machine learning going way too far?
