Google's John Mueller said that rewriting AI content by a human won't change the site's ranking in Google by default. Instead, he said, you need to rethink your whole content strategy and the purpose of the site.
The question came up on Reddit which asked:
Can a site with low-quality AI content recover and be indexed if I rewrite everything manually and switch languages?A while ago I started a small niche site mostly as an experiment to see how AI content would perform with SEO. The content was low quality and mostly AI-written in English.
The site is not being indexed (Crawled – currently not indexed but I really like the domain and I spent a lot of time on the design/UX, so I’d prefer not to throw it away. So, I’m considering starting over from scratch but I have some questions:
1) Is it possible for this domain to recover and be fully indexed if I rebuild it with high-quality, original (non-AI) content, even though it previously had low-quality AI content?
2) Does switching the main content language (from English to Portuguese) cause any extra issues for indexing or trust, or is Google fine with that as long as the content is good and consistent?
3) Would you recommend keeping the same domain and cleaning everything up or starting fresh with a new domain to avoid any potential history attached to this one?
John Mueller from Google responded that it isn't that simple... He wrote, "Just rewriting AI content by a human won't change that, it won't make it authentic."
Here is what he said:
I wouldn't think about it as AI or not, but about the value that the site adds to the web. Just rewriting AI content by a human won't change that, it won't make it authentic.
So what should you do? He basically said start over, think about the site's purpose and see how you will add value. Otherwise, starting with a "bad state" will make it harder than starting with a new domain.
He wrote:
If you want to change all your sites content, I'd approach it as essentially starting over with no content, and consider what it is that you want to do on the site, not as a checklist of pages that you need to tweak manually. Starting with a bad state will be harder than starting with a new domain (and perhaps take longer, maybe much longer), but sometimes that's still worthwhile.
John said this recently, that the old domain history has to be shaken off, this is something Google use to say a lot in the past.
That being said, this may also apply to low-quality content.
Here is a screenshot of this:
Forum discussion at Reddit.
