How Bad Use of AI Can Destroy Your SEO

While AI can be an amazing tool for ideation, research, and writing assistance, using it incorrectly can lead to some pretty disastrous results. Let me share a recent example I came across that really drives this point home.

The Dangers of AI-Generated Spam

Someone named Adam Enfroy recently had his website absolutely tank in search rankings. We’re talking a site that was getting 255,000 visits in two months suddenly losing almost all its traffic. Ouch.

What happened? Google hit the site with a manual penalty for violating their spam guidelines. The culprit? Rapidly scaling up content production using AI.

Adam had been pumping out blog posts at an insane rate, likely using AI to automatically generate and publish content multiple times per day. No human review, just an endless stream of AI-created articles.

The result? Google decided the site was now producing garbage instead of quality content. They penalized it heavily, essentially removing it from search results.

Adam’s site was his personal brand.. Now if you Google his name, you’ll find his social profiles but not his actual website. That’s pretty much worst case scenario when it comes to SEO.

Why This Matters

If you rely on SEO as a major marketing channel, this kind of penalty can be absolutely devastating to your business. All that work building up your site’s authority and rankings - gone in an instant.

And honestly? It’s probably a good thing overall. The internet doesn’t need more low-quality AI spam clogging up search results. But it’s a harsh lesson for content creators looking to scale quickly with AI.

A Better Approach to AI-Assisted Content

So how can we use AI for content creation without risking everything? Here are some better ways to incorporate AI into your strategy:

Use AI for topic ideation and research
Get AI feedback on your human-written drafts
Have AI assist with writing specific sections
Use tools like Perplexity for enhanced research

The key is to keep humans in the driver’s seat. Don’t just let AI come up with ideas, write full posts, and publish automatically. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Remember: garbage in, garbage out. If you feed quality information and ideas into AI tools, you can get great content out. But you need to be the one providing that initial direction and oversight.

AI as Your Writing Assistant

The opposite of garbage in, garbage out, is also true. Great quality input based on your human creativity will always triumph over AI generated spam.

This is where a tool like Blog Recorder can be really powerful. Instead of having AI generate content from scratch, you talk out your ideas and the AI helps shape them into an article.

You’re still the source of the core content and ideas. The AI is just helping to structure and polish your thoughts. This results in much more original, thoughtful content compared to what a large language model would create on its own.

It’s the difference between: “Hey ChatGPT, write me a post about blogging” and recording yourself talking about blogging for 30 minutes and having AI shape that into an article.

The second approach keeps you in control while leveraging AI as a writing assistant. The end result is content people actually want to read - informative, well-thought-out, nuanced, and not generic AI spam.

Don’t Let AI Take the Wheel

The big takeaway here? Be very careful about letting AI take complete control of your content creation. Some key rules to follow:

Always have a human review AI-generated content before publishing
Don’t spam - publishing dozens of posts a day is a red flag
Spread out your content - your audience doesn’t want to see 10 posts a day either
Focus on quality over quantity

Conclusion

AI is an incredibly powerful tool for content creators. But like any powerful tool, it needs to be used responsibly. Let AI enhance your content strategy, not completely automate it.

Remember why search engines and social platforms care about content quality in the first place - they want to provide value to their users. Flooding the internet with mediocre AI-generated content helps no one in the long run.

So leverage AI to make your content creation more efficient and effective. But keep that human touch. Your audience (and your search rankings) will thank you for it.