Google’s Cutts: Auto-Generated Content & Search Results In Our Index Violate Our Guidelines

In a recent video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt discussed a pretty obvious spam tactic that Google will take action on.

The question was Does Google take action on automatically generated pages that provide no added value? The answer is, yes. Of course, Google is not perfect and if you see examples of auto-generated content that is found in the search results that do not add value, such as search results pages or scrapped content, Google wants you to submit a spam report.

In fact, Google has a document specifically about this webmaster guidelines violation named automatically generated content and the examples of content like this include:

• Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing
• Text generated through automated processes, such as Markov chains
• Text generated using automated synonymizing or obfuscation techniques
• Text generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value

Here is the video:

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.