Computer Generated Articles - Good or Bad for SEO

I read an article from a few months ago about Computer Generated Articles: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html?pagewanted=all

With the latest Google Panda updates, do you think auto generated articles are good or bad for SEO or Google News?

bad, bad, bad

I'm reading other articles that are for computer generated articles saying:
" For search engines, the issue is not whether content is written by people or machines – it’s whether it is good quality content, in other words useful to searchers. Increasingly computer-written articles will do that."

Do you think some companies are better than others where their software program produces more natural than machine generated articles that Google will like?

If it's machine generated there will be clues that carry over to every article. As good as a machine can be, it will not be the same, as it's nearly impossible to understand context without a human mind. It's not worth the risk, not at all.

Are we seriously STILL being asked this question?

Look, here's the honest truth:

1. In-text links with strong anchor text = Good.
2. Spun articles = extremely poor, very likely to get smacked down by Panda/offer minimal value.
3. Instead of spinning articles, either engage bloggers, guest blog, or if you want to be gray hat (but exceptionally effective) tap into a blog network and have someone write a bunch for you.

#3 will likely not work forever, but right now it's absolutely cleaning up in the SERPs.

But don't spin articles, K?

<3,

Electricprez

OK, first off - BAD - don't do it.

Thinking a little deeper about the issue, most of the programs that do this are not really "generating" the articles, more they are hacking bits of other content about to try and create something that appears to be unique but isn't really. This is called content spinning and is something that is becoming more prevelant in some SEO software programs.

Content spinning its self will probably cause you negative results or some kind of penalty in the long term, even though it may give some short term benefit.

There is a technique called Levenstein Distance or LD Analysis that can tell how similar a document is to another one. This technique can, in large part negate all content spinning articles.

Further more, when we are really talking about automated "generating" of an article, I don't think current computing technology is capable. There are certainly computing techniques that can allow free thinking and can come to different solutions with the same information - aka being human. So it is conceivable that a computer program may be able to create something inditinguishable from a human written article, but I don't think we are there yet.

Do your self and everyone else a favour - write a quality article for your users.

Ok first off, I actually read the article and its all about AI writing human readable content for sports events.

That is a separate debate from what people may have been thinking about (spinning text etc). If you can provide data in the form that a computer can one day organize and write an article good luck to you. It will probably read better than many human bloggers out there anyway ...

If you are asking about spinning text, thats a whole other ball game.

It's the same thing. Do research on the topic. Just as Google has algorithms, the 'bots' who compose these documents do, too - which can be picked up on.

Computer generated articles (or anything auto generated for that matter) are bad bad bad.

It will never know where is the limit & will keep on posting anywhere & everywhere. Back link from a valueless site is as valueless as the site. Too much back links like these can trigger the spam alarm of Google.

One more problem of these auto generated article is,suppose, you want to link a particular keyword with a particular URL, you can easily do it manually, but auto generated post will link any keyword as it's wish.

I'd say, this is not a good idea.

Everybody argues here that computer generated articles are bad, but nobody is giving any reasons for that

Read.

I personally find it amusing to see both "machine" and "natural" in one sentence. LOL

Having a gibberish article sounds like a really bad idea. Now if its sports writing. The first thing I think about is the announcers in any sports video game calling the play by play in real English sentences.

auto-generated articles are not good because it will just spin and spin articles and Google Panda is too wise to notice that.

Google is not as wise as people think, it is still a machine reading all pages.