Google has a guidelines in its webmaster guidelines against automatically generated content but that guideline might change as machines and AI get better at producing not just understandable but useful content for humans. John Mueller of Google said thinking into the future, he can see this guideline changing with that. But for now, machine written content is not okay.
Via DeepCrawl on Twitter, John Mueller of Google said at the 53:05 mark into a video hangout that maybe a few years "down the road, I could imagine that that happens," where Google allows such machine written content. He said "So with that in mind, I think at some point in the future, we will have to revisit this guideline and find a way to make it a little bit more granular and that it kind of differentiates between these totally spammy uses of auto-generated content and the actually pretty useful uses of automatically generated content."
This is not old fashioned content stitching or really spammy stuff, this is content that is not just "actually pretty understandable" but "actually pretty useful" John said. We covered this topic a couple years ago and Google was already iffy on the topic, so I suspect this will happen soon enough.
Here is the video embed:
Here is the transcript:
The other more oh, I guess future looking aspect, is their various machine learning algorithms that try to generate text as well. Based on some amount of kind of starter information. And more and more of the examples I'm seeing there are that these algorithms are able to generate something that is actually pretty understandable and actually pretty useful. Where if you feed it the right amount of information in the beginning it'll be able to take that content and write it up in a way that is actually really easy to understand and provides a lot of value.I don't know if that's it that far now that I would say that this kind of auto-generated content is completely fine. And nobody will understand of notice that it was generated by a script, rather than a human.
But maybe few years down the time, down the road, I could imagine that that happens. And at some point it'll be that when we manually look at these pages you can't tell if it was written by a human or written by some kind of advanced machine learning setup. And at that point doesn't really matter if it was generated automatically or not? From a user's point of view it has the same value.
So with that in mind, I think at some point in the future, we will have to revisit this guideline and find a way to make it a little bit more granular and that it kind of differentiates between these totally spammy uses of auto-generated content and the actually pretty useful uses of automatically generated content.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
