A client shared with me the links he bought from Authority Builders and OneLittleWeb.
I ran the guest posts through Originality.AI and the results were staggering.
Disclaimer: at the time we tested those articles Originality was still reliable enough, they went downhill soon after.
95% of the guest posts that One Little Web provided were detected as 99%+ AI, even though Originality has a lot of false flags, scoring 99% AI in their tool is not the norm.
65% of the guest posts provided by Authority.Builders, showed considerable traces of AI-generated content.
Let’s break that down:
- Approx half of the 65% scored 20-30% AI
- The other half scored >60% AI
In other words, large guest post providers are already using AI content without disclosing it to their clients and these weren’t cheap guest posts, they ran into the hundreds of dollars per post.
As you can imagine, my client was quite upset by these findings.
But Google approves of AI content
That’s what they said and that’s the part that everyone likes to quote but what they leave out is this:
When it comes to automatically generated content, our guidance has been consistent for years. Using automation — including AI — to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content
Link buying in general is a violation of Google’s spam policies and so is generating content with the primary purpose of manipulating rankings. One plus one is two.
Especially when it’s poorly generated content with minimal human input.
At SERPTrust we maintain strict policies to prevent our writers from using AI content such as:
- Our writers use a Chrome extension that allows us to monitor and playback their writings.
- Each post has to score less than 5% AI in ContentAtScale.
- Each post has to score less than 5% AI in ZeroGPT.
- At least 50% of the guest posts each writer writes need to score >50% human in Originality (this to account for false flags).
Stories go around that even the constitution was written by AI, and so pages of the bible.
Yet, everything that ChatGPT produces, regardless of the chat prompt or generated through the API, always scores 100% AI in Originality.ai, without exception!
In other words, the tool still has a purpose when you know how to interpretate the results… with a huge grain of salt!
Google Recommends AI Disclosures
When large competitors don’t even disclose it to their clients, I don’t see them adding a tag that the content was AI-generated.
Even though Google said that it doesn’t recommend to add an author byline for the AI, you can clearly see the way Google is thinking.
To add in one more Google quote:
Google has many years of experience dealing with automation being used in an attempt to game search results. Our spam-fighting efforts—including our SpamBrain system—will continue, however spam is produced.
Few final words
Mixing guest posts with AI content for your first tier of links is asking for trouble due to violating their terms twice.
If Google wanted to make a point it would look even closer at guest posts and the overall quality of those links to decide whether a site deserves to rank.
Google hasn’t penalized guest posts altogether because they heavily rely on links as a quality signal.
Guest posts are contextual links and they happen to be the most valuable links out there.
So you can imagine Google struggles with that.
By using AI-generated content you take that struggle away as it would be very easy for Google to detect that.
I’d rather stay on the safe side and pick a vendor that has my best interests in mind opposed to one maximizing their profits.
All I can say is, be careful out there!