Since 2010 we knew that using Google Translate or other automatic machine translation services to convert content from one language to another and to rank it in Google was against Google’s guidelines. But recently some are saying with Google Translate getting much better, it has been harder for Google to discover what is machine vs human translated.

One SEO brought up the issue in a hangout with John Mueller last month at the 48:01 mark and John from Google responded saying it is possible that Google isn’t able to figure out some cases. He said even more so, it isn’t about web sites doing this with good intent but those that use auto-translate service to spin and auto-generate content for spam purposes.

Here is the question:

See John admitted “That could always be the case” that Google isn’t able to tell. But he added, it depends on the bigger picture of what the site is doing, he said it is “more a matter of the intent and kind of the bigger picture what what they’re doing.” “If they’re essentially just spinning content and hoping that it ranks, then that that would be more of a problem for us,” he added. He then suggested you share these examples with him so he can dig into them.

Here is the video embed:

Here is Glenn’s tweet that highlighted this:

Forum discussion at Twitter.