Within the early days, Google was not a fan of utilizing instruments to robotically translate your pages after which have Google index and rank these pages, even with Google Translate. However now as AI is getting higher at it, Google is now okay with it, assuming the interpretation is useful and helpful to your customers.
Google has despatched me an announcement months after I wrote about how Reddit AI translated pages are rating properly in Google Search. Google mentioned:
Whereas we don’t touch upon the standing of particular websites or pages, nor do we offer individualized help for any website, our insurance policies don’t strictly outline content material that has been translated by AI as spam. Our scaled content material abuse coverage mentions automated transformations, together with translations, as a part of the general warning in opposition to creating giant quantities of unoriginal content material that gives little to no worth to customers.
As I mentioned in that story, sure, that part within the Google coverage reads:
Scraping feeds, search outcomes, or different content material to generate many pages (together with by automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or different obfuscation methods), the place little worth is supplied to customers.
With that assertion, Google up to date the Managing multi-regional and multilingual websites assist doc and eliminated this part:
Use robots.txt to dam search engines like google from crawling robotically translated pages in your website. Automated translations do not at all times make sense and could possibly be seen as spam. Extra importantly, a poor or artificial-sounding translation can hurt your website’s notion.
It’s simply gone, nothing changed it, Google simply eliminated it.
Glenn Gabe posted on X about this saying, “As well as, Google is eradicating details about blocking auto-translated content material from their documentation about managing multilingual websites. I had a sense they might try this. I believe it was simply neglected.”
Digging in additional, Glenn Gabe’s Is it protected? Does Google’s evolving view of auto-translated content material, and lack of motion with Reddit’s AI translations, open the floodgates for website house owners? just about predicted all of this is able to occur. He careworn that whereas over a decade in the past, Google frowned on these ways, as machine translated content material will get higher, Google grew to become extra accepting of the apply.
Google mentioned they “Eliminated a piece from our multilingual documentation about utilizing robots.txt to dam all robotically translated pages.” This was carried out “To align with our spam coverage replace in March 2024. This can be a docs-only change, no change in habits,” which I lined over right here.
The wild factor is that Reddit, throughout its earnings name, mentioned outright that Google sanctioned this for them. Glenn Gabe lined this properly, he wrote, “Reddit even mentioned, “it’s completely sanctioned (by Google)”… Wow, you’ll be able to take heed to that half within the video under (at 37:38 within the video).”
Google’s assertion, which I listed above, however will put right here additionally, mentioned, “Whereas we don’t touch upon the standing of particular websites or pages, nor do we offer individualized help for any website.”
In any occasion, it appears to be like like Google is cool with you utilizing AI to auto-translate your pages, assuming these translations work properly and are useful to your customers. So possibly go for it, translate your content material, make new URLs for that, comply with the multi regional websites pointers and see how a lot visitors you get for little or no work?
OK, I’ve an replace on the Reddit AI translation scenario. Google despatched me an announcement after I requested in the event that they sanctioned AI translations for Reddit, if AI translations had been now alright to publish, and so on.
My publish has been up to date with the most recent data…
#google #website positioning #reddit
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe.bsky.social) June 11, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Principally, if the content material is top of the range and useful, it is okay to make use of AI translations to scale. Additionally, Google mentioned they do not assist any website particularly (so I assume they did not particularly assist Reddit). And Google eliminated the “block auto-translated content material’ part from their multilingual doc.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe.bsky.social) June 11, 2025 at 11:46 AM
John Mueller from Google occasion replied to Glenn Gabe on Bluesky:
Thanks for including that, Glenn!
— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) June 11, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Discussion board dialogue at X.
