Gwyneth Paltrow is a beloved American actress who is probably best known for her Oscar-winning performance opposite Huey Lewis in the 2000 karaoke hustler movie “Duets.” That was her first and last professional film. After reaching the pinnacle of the acting world, Gwyneth retired from Hollywood to focus on the family she had recently started with “House Party” actor/singer Christoper “Play” Martin. When she wasn’t raising her family, Paltrow launched the lifestyle company Goop, and embarked on a career as a semi-professional downhill skier. Unfortunately, the latter of those two hobbies led to Ms. Paltrow crashing into a courtroom this week. And good news. The verdict is in! Gwyneth Paltrow’s net worth is even bigger than you were thinking!
In case you were wondering, NO this is not a serious article. I’m writing this to prove a point about something that has been going on in the Google search results for… years… but has gotten especially bad recently.
As you might have guessed, a lot of CelebrityNetWorth’s visits come from Google. You google something related to a celebrity’s wealth and hopefully you see CelebrityNetWorth as a result and hopefully click through to read an article on our site.
Unfortunately, actually finding CNW in Google has become very difficult. For example, as I type this article, below is a screenshot of the Google search result page for the “Gwyneth Paltrow net worth.”
Some things to note:
– The red line represents “the fold”, aka where the user would have to scroll to see more of the page.
– The top site “lifestyleasia.com” gets the #1 position for an article that was published yesterday. As you can see from the highlighted text, their article mentions and credits CNW as its source so clearly that Google itself even shows the credit in search result page meta description.
– The People Also Ask widget is so enormous and, in my opinion, useless.
– The top two articles in the Top Stories widget are the aforementioned lifestyleasia.com a site called PrestigeOnline.com. Their article titles are:
“Gwyneth Paltrow: Net worth and expensive things she owns“
“Gwyneth Paltrow: Net worth and her most expensive possessions“
The author of the lifestyleasia.com article is a person named…
Manas Sen Gupta
The author of the PrestigeOnline.com article is a person named…
Manas Sen Gupta
Not only is the content of the two articles identical, given the highly generic and bland copy it was very likely written by an AI chatbot.
Lifestyleasia’s opening paragraph:
Over the course of a long film career, Paltrow has distinguished herself with many accolades, including an Oscar, an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards. But outside her stellar performances in films, Paltrow is now widely hailed as a successful entrepreneur — a transition that began with her starting Goop from her kitchen table as a newsletter directory. In a rather short time, Goop has become a major name in the lifestyle segment.
PrestigeOnline’s opening paragraph:
Over the course of a long film career, Paltrow has distinguished herself with many accolades, including an Oscar, an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards. But outside her stellar performances in films, Paltrow is now widely hailed as a successful entrepreneur — a transition that began with her starting Goop from her kitchen table as a newsletter directory. In a rather short time, Goop has become a major name in the lifestyle market.
Obviously these robo-generated articles have absolutely no place ranking in Google, let alone #1 and essentially #3. And frankly that’s easy for me to say because these are such low quality results. But that’s not where my frustrations about regurgitation end.
Sites that you would probably consider very high quality have made “word laundering” CelebrityNetWorth’s pages part of their daily content production model.
Cosmopolitan.com made an entire section of their website dedicated to word laundering our pages:
And why wouldn’t they? Despite the fact that they cite us as their source multiple times in most of these articles, they instantly jump ahead of us in Google by simply regurgitating our content, likely because they are 100+ year old authoritative brand. Though I would argue, the fact that they need to scrape out some long-tail SEO traffic at the expense of an original independent source, shows that they are no longer deserving of that authoritative status.
It’s not just Cosmopolitan.com. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of very large and respectable publishers have realized they can regurgitating our content and displace us in Google. Everyone from InTouchWeekly to MichiganSportsZone.com have made regurgitating CNW content part of their daily editorial plan. Two particularly egregious offenders are Parade.com and ClutchPoints.
Parade.com:
ClutchPoints:
As you can imagine, it’s extremely frustrating to see these sites snipe our position through regurgitation. And with the advent of Chat GPT, what is stopping a literal million other Manas Sen Guptas from spinning up a million websites and cranking out a million copies of copies of copies of the internet? In February Parade.com’s owner, The Arena Group, announced it had formed a strategic partnership with two AI firms – Jasper and Nota to:
“…speed and broaden its AI-assisted efforts in content workflows, video creation, newsletters, sponsored content, and marketing campaigns. The partnerships will unlock new tools for the editorial teams at 250 brands operating on the Company’s platform, including Sports Illustrated, TheStreet, Parade, and Men’s Journal.“
Cool.
I know what you’re thinking – Why doesn’t CelebrityNetWorth take advantage of robots like ChatGPT. I have played around with ChatGPT. It’s… ok? I find even Chat GPT-4 uses a lot of the same very generic phrases in its writing and, worse, is still very prone to hallucinating extremely important facts and numbers.
But maybe more importantly, all this robo content feels… empty. The internet that gave birth to all the websites you love was unique, weird, expressive and HUMAN.
UPDATE:
Within an hour of publishing this story, two funny things happened (so far).
- #1) Here’s how Google was displaying the search result page for a bit:
- #2) Now at least this article ranks in Top Stories:
