Human generated content is important for SEO today For a couple of reasons. One, it always has been. Because human generated content is always going to be better.
I take that back. Maybe it’s not always going to be better or wasn’t historically. And this is one of the interesting things about using AI content, which we were doing for awhile, is that it seemed good. And it was good in a lot of ways. Because it was taking this average of the content that was out there on the web, on a given topic and regurgitating it reiterating it. And it seemed pretty complete. You could just keep drilling down into ideas and it would come up with stuff that sounded really good and was pretty good.
What it lacked was a human voice. It sounded bland. Setting aside the potential for it just to be wrong, for it to be hallucinating, for it to be using biased information, incorrect information, et cetera. I’m assuming you’re editing it for quality and correctness. It lacked human voice. Which is problematic, from a branding standpoint. But it worked well enough, it worked for SEO for a long time.
Until recently with Google’s announcement of their policy change, where they’re going to de-prioritize unoriginal content. So necessarily AI content is unoriginal. And they’re going to prioritize original content. And human generated content, in all of the variability and all the different ways that we naturally talk about things. They’re going to lift up that content in their search results.
Further AI content, because it lacks this human voice, I think this should be taken seriously, can sound less trustworthy to a human reader. And it’s an unconscious thing, perhaps. It might sound bland, but it doesn’t sound like a person, it doesn’t sound like the business. It can ring hollow. It can ring a false note.
Ultimately bringing us to where we are today and moving forward, AI content is just a liability. Full stop.
Because Google is going to be deprioritizing unoriginal content. So if you’re using AI to generate content and it was great because it just made it easy and making original stuff is hard. It’s hard to come up with ideas. It’s hard to do it just to get it done. You can just have it on the, to do list forever. AI would just knock it out. That’s no longer going to be working as well. We’ve already seen websites that use a lot of AI content take hits in the rankings. And we’re going to see more of that moving Forward.
How does Google evaluate expertise and authority?
This policy announcement of Google, this seeming change, and it is a change, is also inline with moves that Google has made over several years trying to move content creators, business owners, and SEOs, digital marketers to create better content, better user experiences for people using Google for people using the web.
Previously, before this recent policy announcement saying that they’re going to de-prioritize unoriginal content, they made a point to promote what they called EAT or EEAT. Encouraging content creators to create content that is expert driven, authoritative, trustworthy, and the first E is Experience.
So showing that you have personal experience, with the topic that you’re discussing, you have expertise, that you have authority, and that you should be trusted.
So for example, If you’re a doctor and you have a blog post. You can send signals to Google that you are an expert in this field, that you are authoritative, that you are trustworthy. You could include, say a picture of you, a link to your bio with your accreditation’s, links to your research papers.
Google can kind of put all this stuff together and figure out who looks like they know what they’re talking about. Whereas a site that’s just giving no signals of expertise, authority, trust, experience, maybe isn’t going to be viewed as favorably and isn’t going to get a ranked as well for similar content.
What Google is doing now is they’re saying, not only those signals, but we also want you to prove – prove through the content itself – that it is original. Because Google can see all of the content out there on a given topic and they can see what looks very similar to what else. So they want your content to be original. And just necessarily, again, coming from a human voice, it’s going to be original, it’s going to be different than the content that’s already out there.