I was on a Zoom webinar recently when the topic of #chatgpt came up. One participant was not aware of it. No, I don’t know what rock he has been living under during the past 6+ months.

When the host described the capabilities of ChatGPT and other Natural Language Processors (#nlp), he was very excited. This, he said, would make all of his blog and website content creation so much faster and easier! Just copy and paste. Easy peasy 🙂

Whoa, Kimosabe!!!

Using #ai for website content, including blog posts, can torpedo your rankings in online search rankings. Most notably, #google .

Google loves and will reward fresh, original content. If it detects non-original content however, it will punish the publisher with lower rankings and domain authority.

And there are a bunch of applications that can identify AI generated text including Google’s own Google Cloud Natural Language API. And you can bet Google uses it when crawling web pages, raising red flags when it finds offenders.

Then there’s the issue of duplicate content. Whatever prompt you give ChatGPT, someone else has likely used the same. And the output is likely going to be identical. Duplicate content is a search ranking killer.

Large Language Models #llm are great for doing research. I used ChatGPT to research facts for this post. And you can ask it to write you an outline so you can structure your content properly using YOUR words. These, in themselves, are very helpful and a huge time saver.

There are instances however when copying and pasting ChatGPT generated content is totally safe. For instance, your email newsletter. No search engine crawls email messages. Or, social media posts. Your posts here on #linkedin or other platforms do not help or hurt your website’s search rankings. Just keep that content off your website.

Still, I am sure that lots of website designers, publishers, content creators, etc., are doing the copy/paste thing for website content now anyway. Then, in time, they’ll wonder why their website traffic and search rankings have tanked.

That’s where the opportunity comes in for me and other #SEO professionals. We will be busy cleaning up the messes by finding the offending content, editing Robots.txt files and sitemaps. And I’ll bet we will be able to command a fairly handsome fee for the trouble.

One man’s whoa is another man’s opportunity.