A post on X caused quite a stir over the weekend.
It started with a case study being published by Jake Ward, claiming that he’d pulled off ‘an SEO heist’ that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor.
He went on to explain exactly how he did it.
We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor.
We got 489,509 traffic in October alone.
Here's how we did it: pic.twitter.com/sTJ7xbRjrT
— Jake Ward (@jakezward) November 24, 2023
People are mad. And it’s also made people question whether this is an ‘ethical’ way to do SEO. Are we seeing a return to ‘black hat’ tactics that work?
TL;DR: someone exported a competitor’s sitemap, turned the URLs into article titles, and used an AI copywriting tool to create 1,800 articles based on those titles for their client’s site. And it worked. Based on the screenshots they shared, it looks like by the end of November, the site will exceed 500,000 sessions per month.
This was obviously very frustrating for the owners of the site that was targeted, Exceljet. The site has been around for 10 years and they have clearly invested a great deal of time and effort into producing content for their site.
For now, at least, Google doesn’t seem to be able to detect that the articles on this site were scraped and repurposed using AI, even though it appears these articles were published en masse. Or perhaps, it just doesn’t care?
When I wrote a few months ago about how AI was going to break the internet, this was exactly what I meant.
If it’s happened to them, could it happen to you?
Yeah, it could. Easily. It’s hard to detect, and almost impossible to prevent entirely.
It almost feels like a resurgence in being able to manipulate search results at the push of a button, as many SEOs did back in the day by using spammy link-building tactics and article spinning.
Thought on AI-Article Spinning for 2023
1. Left side – Original content researched/written by a human
2. Right side – Same content scraped + spun by AI pic.twitter.com/rLsn97mrXB
— Cyrus SEO (@CyrusShepard) November 26, 2023
The use of AI copywriting tools has generally been frowned upon by many in the SEO community, but if the goal is to produce content that outranks a competitor, does it really matter if it’s been written by a human, or a bot?
After all, the vast majority of content that exists on the internet has been produced after researching what others have written on a topic, and looking to improve upon it. Does the AI aspect not just remove the time and effort needed to research and write the content? Could this time be better spent elsewhere?
Do users care who writes the content, and are they even going to bother checking whether it’s factually correct? If you suspect your content has been scraped, but paraphrased, how would you prove it?
And is there any risk in publishing content produced exclusively by AI? Will there be a time when Google is able to detect it?
For now, at least, AI-generated content can, and does work. Knowing that it can work opens up plenty of opportunities for anyone trying to make a quick buck… especially those who want to rank purely to generate an income from selling ad space and affiliate links. They won’t care if a site is eventually penalised, as they can just nuke that domain and start over.
How AI-generated content is going to impact not only the SEO industry, but the internet as we know it, is yet to be seen.
Update: lol
Google has stolen this traffic back.
According to Ahrefs, traffic is falling off a cliff.
I do not see any rankings present, and using a site: search, only the homepage is currently indexed.
Do not embarrass Google. https://t.co/qLVVW50Ehi pic.twitter.com/iNOOnkc9MZ
— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) November 29, 2023