Google knocked out thousands of sites in August without warning anyone

Google rolled out another spam update in August (the third one this year alone) and this one was brutal: sites sitting in the top 10 were about 82% more likely to drop past position 100 compared to a period without the update (and 17% of them really did fall in the rankings!!). In other words, a lot of people who were ranking well woke up to find their site gone from Google 😥

Google did not say exactly which sites were hit, but digging into it we can see the following picture: sites with mass-produced, low-value content were probably the ones that suffered most, especially those full of pages with no real value for the reader, made only to try to rank. And guess what a lot of those sites have in common? They used AI to scale all that content.

Here is a really important point: the problem is not using AI to create content (Google has already made that clear), it is using AI to scale bad content, shallow and useless, just to stuff the site with pages and show up in search!

Well-made, optimized and useful AI content held its rankings, and in some cases even climbed!

That is exactly why Automarticles was built the way it was: not to churn out empty content in bulk, but to create optimized articles with the right structure, designed for Google and now for AI too, that actually deliver value to the reader, which is what Google wants to see. And the data backs it up: while plenty of sites were falling with the spam updates, blogs with content generated by Automarticles saw an 18.1% increase in clicks from July to August :)

If you want to be on the right side of the next spam updates, come try Automarticles!
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If you noticed a drop on your site during that period, it is worth opening Search Console and checking the performance report to see whether impressions and clicks fell between August 18 and 21.