Embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) whether for personal or professional use has clear advantages – and Google agrees.
While it’s a common misconception that Google automatically penalises all AI-generated content, the search engine’s policies expressly state that the misuse of AI is what they’re actually concerned about.
What are the potential consequences of AI misuse?
Google is clear about how they detect and penalise AI misuse. Through a combination of automated systems and human review, manual action can be taken whereby sites that violate the search engine’s policies are ranked lower in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) or not at all.
For your website, this could mean a reduction in online visibility, having a knock-on impact on your click-through rates and organic traffic. The key to avoiding AI misuse? Understanding Google’s policies and their specific definition of misusing AI.
Google’s policies on AI
The search engine mentions AI both directly in Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content and indirectly in their policy on scaled content abuse.
Google Search AI-generated Content policy
As per their AI-generated content advice, Google asserts their belief that AI can be used to aid the delivery of helpful information, supporting the search engine’s long-established core mission of uniting online users with genuinely helpful content.
However, Google emphasises the fact that they value ‘original, high-quality’ content above all else. While AI tools can be useful for conducting research, analysing trends, editing and proofreading, it’s for this reason that it shouldn’t be relied on entirely.
Why? Because all the content that these tools produce is unoriginal. It might be presented in a clear and concise manner and tailored to your prompt, but the information it includes has been taken from another source (or more likely several different web pages) online.
For website owners, this means you must bring something new and unique to the table. Whether that’s a new perspective, expert commentary on an industry trend, or an exploration of a recent case study, this original content (when relevant and well-written) is deemed more valuable by Google.
Google Scaled Content Abuse policy
Within the scaled abuse policy that aims to tackle the practice of manipulating search rankings instead of genuinely helping online users, Google elaborates on how they don’t approve of using generative AI tools (or similar) to create lots of pages that don’t add any value.
Essentially, this means utilising AI tools to generate lots of pages is fine in the eyes of Google – as long as these pages include original content.
Other examples of scaled content abuse includes combining content from various online sources without adding value and creating lots of web pages where the content focuses more on incorporating search keywords than producing useful, coherent content.
If you’ve previously worked with a digital marketing or SEO agency to create content that violates these guidelines, it’s important to prevent this content from being crawled and indexed by excluding it from search.
Aqueous Digital’s team of technical SEO specialists can carry out this task for you and even produce a new content strategy that ensures the delivery of fresh, unique, and truly helpful content that’s relevant to your industry, products, and services.
What should you do?
Keen to avoid being penalised by Google for AI misuse? Pay attention to Google’s E-E-A-T quality rater guidelines. Standing for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, these guidelines outline the fundamentals of creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.
Instead of using content primarily to attract and manipulate search engines, focus on meeting the needs of online users. Crucially, Google highlights trust as one of the most important factors – and to determine trustworthiness, raters look for accuracy, honesty, safety, and reliability.
Efforts such as establishing your business as an industry expert with thought leadership pieces, achieving (and shouting about) awards, gaining and displaying positive reviews, citing reliable sources in your blogs, and protecting your site with the latest security features are all ways that you can make your content more trustworthy.
Human-first content from Aqueous Digital
Regardless of whether you utilise AI tools or real writers to create your content, what matters is that you’re producing helpful, reliable, and original content that provides value for online users.
At Aqueous Digital, we can help you to identify and create high-quality content that improves the user experience on your site, adds industry value, and builds your online authority.
Alongside implementing effective SEO content strategies, our expert team can fine tune the technical elements of your site, ensuring your content is easy for Google’s bots to find, understand, and recommend to searchers.
Got a question about using AI to create your online content? Speak to our talented team today!
Pick up the phone and dial 0800 285 1424, email your enquiry to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk, or fill out our online contact form.
