Machine-translation QA flag (September 11, 2025 QRG)
Google's January 23, 2025 Quality Rater Guidelines update added explicit language about machine-translated content with no human review as a form of scaled content abuse (§4.6.5). This is also the enforceable webmaster-facing spam policy (updated 2026-05-15), which names "automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques" as scaled content abuse: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies
"Using automated tools (generative AI or otherwise) as a low-effort way to produce many pages that add little-to-no value."
Machine-translated content is fine when reviewed by a human speaker and corrected. Untranslated MT (or "lightly post-edited" output that still contains hallucinated terms, wrong gender/number agreement, or untranslated proper nouns) is treated as scaled content abuse.
Signals the seo-hreflang audit should surface
| Signal | Severity | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Multiple hreflang alternates point to URLs whose content is identical except for header chrome |
Critical | Indicates the body wasn't translated; just template wrapped. |
lang="xx" attribute on <html> doesn't match the body language |
High | Translation pipeline output without a final QA step. |
Auto-translated <meta name="description"> longer than 160 chars (untrimmed) |
Medium | The translator overran the snippet limit; no human reviewer caught it. |
lang attribute is auto or missing entirely |
Medium | Pages that don't declare their language confuse hreflang + AI crawlers. |
| Untranslated proper nouns or product names sprinkled in body | Low (heuristic) | Common MT failure mode; hard to detect automatically. |
Schema.org inLanguage field absent or wrong |
Medium | Multi-language audits should cross-check inLanguage vs. body. |
What the audit should NOT flag
- Sites that have a few MT pages clearly labelled as MT (a human-translation-fallback pattern). Google's QRG explicitly permits MT when honestly labelled and clearly scoped.
- Machine-translated UI strings: those are i18n, not "content".
- Content with
lang="auto"if the audit can't fetch a fallback signal (be conservative; don't claim what we can't verify).
Cross-skill delegation
- For per-page hreflang validation, stay inside
seo-hreflang. - For broader scaled-content scoring (entropy of translated pages,
AI-pattern detection in body), defer to
seo-contentvia"${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/claude-seo" run content_quality.py. - For "is this translated by Google's own auto-translate widget"
detection, look for the
.goog-te-banner-frameiframe. There is no per-mechanism exemption: in June 2025 Google removed the robots.txt-blocking guidance for auto-translated pages, and auto/AI- translated content is now judged case-by-case on user value. Use page-levelnoindexfor low-value translated pages, not sitewide blocks; the widget also produces poor passage-citability.
Primary sources
- Current QRG (September 11, 2025; 182 pages; nothing newer through 2026-09-23): https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf (the services.google.com hsw-sqrg.pdf file is the 36-page 2023 Overview, not the guidelines)
- John Mueller on MT (multiple SOTR episodes, 2024-2025): MT is OK when reviewed by a human; bulk MT without review is abuse.
Last verified: 2026-07-09.