Using templates to generate content

[algospider]

Hello,

I am having a coding background and for my current project, I love the idea of creating a template that fills with data to generate content. My understanding is that this is not inline with the content guidelines that google requires.

Still I see articles, especially in the financial domain, that are clearly ranking and are auto generated, if you compare them to other articles on the same website. Often these articles are ranking for keywords with less volume (f.ex. 100 - 500). Due to the volume of the content these websites still get some decent traffic.

Some of these websites are also part of the google news index. (and get even more traffic!)

1. What's your opinion about this strategy? What are the important aspects to focus on?
2. How does google measure if content is high-quality or not? ( I was reading that the LSI-Algo plays a role)
3. From your experience: What does work? What doesn`t work?

I appreciate if you share your experience!

 

[MrSanti]

Hello,

I am having a coding background and for my current project, I love the idea of creating a template that fills with data to generate content. My understanding is that this is not inline with the content guidelines that google requires.

Still I see articles, especially in the financial domain, that are clearly ranking and are auto generated, if you compare them to other articles on the same website. Often these articles are ranking for keywords with less volume (f.ex. 100 - 500). Due to the volume of the content these websites still get some decent traffic.

Some of these websites are also part of the google news index. (and get even more traffic!)

1. What's your opinion about this strategy? What are the important aspects to focus on?
2. How does google measure if content is high-quality or not? ( I was reading that the LSI-Algo plays a role)
3. From your experience: What does work? What doesn`t work?

I appreciate if you share your experience!

Take a look at this: https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/open-ai-gpt-3.5158/

Theoretically is possible, but I feel that Google will probably penalize the website sooner or later. But you could try it out, would be interesting to see how it works (if you can, make a journal)

I'm not an expert, but I've been playing with some more advanced on-page seo, keyword frequency, LSI... But for some reason, the more "natural" articles, were I don't have this things in mind, are ranking a bit better.

To have better rankings, include all the typical stuff, a ton of Images, media, having a decent CTR on Google, and of course some quality backlinks.

 

[bernard]

I think it's a great idea, but you have to be careful how you do it.

In my opinion, spinning content is a big no. That's just poor quality.

Auto-generated content based on data, that is something else.

I have a site that scrapes various things and does various calculations (sorry I can't get more specific) and then from that I autogenerate the content in the form of numbers, graphs and some text where it replaces numbers and such.

It has gotten a lot of love from Google from the beginning, so I think Google does reward any kind of site that has unique content and unique data in particular.

With the AI mentioned above, I would say you could begin using that to generate short content. I wouldn't use it for long text, but you could use it to describe some text excerpts that you scrape from other sites (Wikipedia, About.com, Wikihow, Dictionaries etc).

If you combine the unique data with some pre-filled templates (they can be textually conditional as well, with various graphs and illustrations, then I think you could have some AI spun content in there, without too much of a problem. You can also add product feeds, which are dynamic and add to the uniqueness of the page.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've done this to great success in the rehab industry back in the day. It doesn't work like it used to in such competitive industries though.

I used to generate pages for every state (never got down to the city) and then "ad-libbed" paragraphs of content by filling in the blanks with data. I'd also change adjectives around (manual spinning easy words). I did all this using custom fields in Wordpress and mass uploading everything from CSV using WP All Import.

You can provide unique, original, and useful content in this manner. Google is fine with "generated" content. They just don't want "auto-generated" content, which would be content that is created on the fly whenever someone lands on a new URL. You could compare it to search results on a website with the parameter ?s=random%20search%20phrase. It's auto-generated and not a real page.

I've written about my method at length on BuSo before, multiple times. You should be able to find the posts if you dig.