Google Video Spam Through Text-To-Speech Technology

Roger Montti posted on Twitter that he is seeing more and more spammers using a technique to spam Google through videos. In short, the spammers would find the top ranking content, use text-to-speech software to create automated videos of the content, while using the featured image as the background to the video. Then those videos would rank in Google search.

He reported the issue to a bunch of Googlers and Gary Illyes from Google said he sent it along to the Google webspam team:

Sent it over to the webspam team, thanks

— Gary “鯨理／경리” Illyes (@methode) December 28, 2019

I am not sure how new this technique is? I’ve seen it a ton around political campaigns over the past few years or so, more so on YouTube. But I guess these videos are now showing up higher in the organic search results – which makes it a newer spam problem in web search?

In any event, I would hope Google can address these types of things quickly? If you have examples, feel free to add some in the comments.

Forum discussion at Twitter.