AI content quality vs spam

Google just released their March spam update. This was an update targeting low quality content generated by AI.

As someone who runs an agency that generates a large volume of AI generated content for about 40 to 50 websites, I just want to talk about the impact this has had on our clients. So Google releases a few of these spam updates every year, and they can target a couple different types of spam.

Sometimes they target link spam, sometimes they target reputation abuse spam, and sometimes they target content spam. Unlike most spam updates, this one rolled out very quickly.

It was completed in only 19 hours, and this made it very easy for people to evaluate the effect. And from essentially all the reporting online, this was not targeting link spam or reputation abuse.

Sites that got hit the hardest, and some sites really got hit hard, were sites that were generating a large volume of AI written content...

on in their traffic pattern. So how did we avoid being hit, do you actually need to worry about getting hit by one of these spam updates?

First, you need to understand that Google doesn't care if you're using AI to generate your content. All I care about is the quality of the content.

The thing is, it's really hard for their algorithms to detect quality. Even attempting to evaluate quality would dramatically increase Google's costs.

Google has no idea if your content is accurate or insightful. Instead, Google's algorithms are trying to evaluate whether your content was low effort and whether it satisfied the intent of the searcher.

Even though the content we're generating for our clients is entirely written by AI, it's far from low effort. We have about 12 steps in our content creation process, from keyword research to in depth research on the topic.

Collecting information from our client, drafting the article according to our writing guidelines...

the AI are the ones where they're actually better than humans. Look, I worked with a lot of talented content writers before ChatGPT came out.

But none of those writers could remember every single aspect of a client's business, every detail of every product and service and team member. None of them could remember 100 SEO guidelines and 100 more specific to this client.

None of them could ever capture every opinion the brand shared on social media and incorporate that into the content. When you're smart about how you use AI to write content, Google doesn't see it as spam.