And it's an uphill battle to teach "regular people" to not simply click one of the top links on Google and believe what it says. This is especially true for health and wealth topics.
Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
A lot of the garbage content is designed to look like real content and it can often take 10-20 seconds to figure out that the generated content is just fluff and offers nothing new or useful. That’s probably long enough for google to accept it as good content.
In gardening this is especially true because one could simply copy the text on the back of a seed packet and add filler words to make a paragraph. For a lot of these types of topics and blogs google should really look at re-engagement scores.
How many many times the user comes back to the same page, how many times it’s bookmarked and how often the user views other content on the page.
That being said I think google is probably complicit in reducing search quality because doing so Allows them to present many times the number of ads. If it takes 20-30 websites and multiple searches to find a decent article on growing strawberries then they would have generated that much extra ad revenue. There isn’t an incentive to get search right, just right enough that they are better than bing and that’s not a hard metric to beat.
Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.