Back in August 2022, Google’s search quality team announced the Google Helpful Content Update, where they would start scanning websites for AI plagiarized content and would penalize websites that utilized content written to game search. Additionally, Google announced that they would “demote site scraping content from other sites”.
Now this week, they announced the roll out of the Google Helpful Content Update classifier was in full effect, going global and in multiple languages. December 6th is when it hit, so people utilizing AI to write blog posts and site content will sett their site traffic and keyword ranks drop.
What does this mean for SEO? It means your content should be original – not plagiarized – and while using AI tools can help generate content quickly, Google is ahead of the curve once again to disallow search results being littered with nonsensical copy.
Duy Nguyen from Google has a 30 minute video explaining the change and logic behind it over on YouTube. At the 9:19 mark, he says “Scraping content, even with some modification, is against our spam policy.” Duy added that Google has “many algorithms to go after such behaviors and demote site scraping content from other sites.”
Adding another layer of accountability, users can also report sites that are scraping content and rank high.
This post originally appeared on the Large Media blog.
