There is a growing number of tools out there that can write (or at least help write) content for your website. As of today, that kind of content goes against Google’s guidelines — but probably not for long.
According to Google’s John Mueller:
From our guidelines it is the case that if it’s automatically generated content it should be blocked by robots for example. But my feeling is at some point that is going to shift a little bit in the sense that we’ll focus more on the quality rather than how it was generated.
To be honest, I think we might be there already. If the content is of high enough quality, Google may not be able to tell the difference, and that’s only going to be become more difficult as machine written content improves.
Taking it further, John talks a bit about what happens if machine written content isn’t any good:
And this kind of low effort content I think will continue to be something that our systems will try to recognize as low quality maybe spam and treat appropriately. And in the end if it’s low quality content it doesn’t matter if it was written by a person or by a machine, it’s like it’s not that useful for people.
It’s that last sentence that really matters — is the content any good? If so, the source becomes less important.
As someone that manually writes at least a post every day, the idea of machine written content kind of makes me sad. On the other hand, it’s coming and there is no way to stop it, so understanding the usefulness of it will be important to follow in the coming years so we can all make the best of it.
(source: SE Roundtable)
