E550: This guy nuked his company by getting greedy with AI generated pages after first seeing success.
This is a story mirrored by many reckless SEOs and webmasters.
I even share a story of a startup I’ve been monitoring for over a year now. They used tens of thousands of AI generated pages to rank for 213,000 keywords in just a few months. Now… they only rank for 1 keyword in the top positions of Google. Absolutely decimated.
But it turns out it is possible to recover from having your site penalized for using AI-generated spam. I share how one webmaster personally did it and how others say it has been done.
I think I killed my startup with GPT generated pages: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1hu5jgw/i_think_killed_my_startup_with_gpt_generated_pages/
Google penalizing all Google Search Console properties: https://x.com/NicheSiteLady/status/1766043621529174081
This website didn’t exist one year ago: https://edwardsturm.com/articles/this-website-didnt-exist-one-year-ago-remarkable-seo-story/
00:00 Introduction 00:26 A Year of Monitoring an AI Site 01:15 Reddit Thread: Seeking Advice from the SEO Community 02:48 Google's Spam Policy and Scaled Content Abuse 03:57 Recovery Strategies and Success Stories 04:18 Google Search Console 08:03 Additional Comments 10:14 Case Study: Eightify.app’s Rise and Fall 13:49 Closing Remarks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#seotips #searchengineoptimization #digitalmarketing #marketingstrategy
This is about sites that are using lots of AI-generated pages to rank for keywords on Google or Bing, using mass amounts of AI-generated pages for SEO. First, I'm going to share a story on Reddit of a guy who just nuked his site. He nuked his company doing this. And then I'm going to share another website that I've been monitoring for a year now, actually a bit over a year, and it was once ranking for over 200,000 keywords using these AI-generated pages. And it went from, in three months, ranking for, I think, zero keywords, it was a new site, it did this, and it was ranking for over 200,000 keywords within a year of starting the site and within three months of doing a press push. And then I'm going to share how many keywords they are ranking for now. So if you're thinking about using mass amounts of AI-generated pages to do SEO, or maybe you're already doing it, and you want to just hear stories from others who have tried it, this episode will be for you. Some interesting stuff, here, lots of people have either tried or are still thinking of trying using tons of AI-generated pages to rank for keywords. This thread on the search engine optimization subreddit is called I Think I Killed My Startup with the GP-generated pages. This is what the post says. Hey, I need some advice from the SEO hivemind. I saw an 80% traffic drop from one day to the next, and I'm pretty sure this might be the death of my domain. Here's the deal. I use GPT to generate thousands of pages in one content category, but added enriched data/context to make it useful. That actually worked pretty well. Then I got greedy and pumped out another batch of GPT-only pages, no extra data or value added, and I'm guessing Google didn't vibe with that. I assume their spam detection algorithm classifies my page as spam. So now I'm wondering, A, should I delete those GPT-only pages to try and regain Google's trust? Or is my domain toast for good? How long could that take? Would migrating the working content category to a new domain be a better play? Any advice from someone who's been through this or seen it happen, let me know what's worked for you. So that is what the original poster says. This is the top comment, it's my favorite comment, and my second favorite comment was all the way at the bottom. So I'm gonna read the last comment. I'm gonna read that second, but this is the top comment. Your problem is not creating content with chat GPT, but more so doing it at scale. It's very likely that your site got flagged as spam by Google after the recent update. I'm going to copy paste a comment from user web linker that summarizes why you probably got it. So this is from Google's spam policy guide. It's called Scaled Content Abuse, and it says Scaled Content Abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it is created. Examples of scaled content abuse include but are not limited to using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value to users, scraping feeds, search results or other content to generate many pages, including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating or other obfuscation techniques where little value is provided to users, stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value, creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content, creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords. And so that's what Google had to say about this. And then this is what the user who shared this in the comments said. Now as to what you should do next, if you can see a penalty in Google Search Console, you can try deleting all the spam content and sending a request for a manual review explaining everything you've done and corrected. I've seen this work, but it is not guaranteed. If you don't have a manual penalty in Google Search Console, your domain is indeed toast. By the way, Google Search Console, it's Google's proprietary tool for accessing their search index. If you don't know, you submit, you should always, if you're trying to do SEO or just in general, if you want visibility, you just should submit your domain to Google Search Console, connect it. And whenever you publish a new page that's important, also submit that to Google Search Console. So Google can crawl it right away if you have any hub pages that links out to all your important pages, submit those to Google Search Console, too, and also put in your site maps within Google Search Console. In a site map, you can see what a site map is by going to your domain.com/sitemap.xml or a site map underscore.xml. It's a list of pages on your site for crawlers, for robots, but also for people to see, to see all the pages on your site. That's Google Search Console, if you don't know. This is the last comment in this thread, and I thought it was a very good comment because this happened to somebody else. This person got hit but was able to rebound. This person got hit for using tons of AI generated pages back in March when lots of people were getting hit, but this person was able to rebound. This is what happened. So the user says, "We got hit by an update in March 2024, and all pages disappeared from Google Search except the main page." I did two things. Number one, I rewrote all the pages that had AI content. I had them all rewritten by a human and deleted any duplicates. So removed all the AI content and wrote it with a human. Number two, try to build more of a brand on social media for our domain. This is the result with more time people started using our brand name in Google Search and we got more backlinks. Finally, in December 2024, all our pages reappeared and are ranking higher than before. At some point though, I already gave up on traffic from Google as it took months and months. March 2024, when this person got hit, lots of other people were getting hit. It was so bad that people would report who were using mass amounts of AI generated pages or even just some AI generated pages, especially with the intent to manipulate Google, people were reporting that not just their one domain using the AI generated content got penalized by Google, but every property on their Google Search Console on the same Google Search Console, every property would get penalized. Even properties that didn't use AI, even properties that didn't use AI generated pages were getting penalized because they were connected to a Google Search Console with a property that was using these AI generated pages. Lots of people at the time thought, okay, Google is just doing a scare tactic, but now it seems that Google is really getting a lot better at this, at detecting this stuff. There's always going to be people who slip through the cracks. You'll definitely, you might hear some people in the comments for my podcast saying that's not true. Google really is really bad at this. They're never gonna figure it out, but I'm seeing lots of reports just like this. Not to mention, if you rapidly go from zero pages being created daily to a thousand or a hundred plus or 50 plus being created daily, that's going to seem suspicious. Every algorithm, social media, Google, whatever it is, looks at the velocity for any type of behavior. If something goes from zero to 100 in a non-normal way, the algorithms will look into it more, red flags will be set off, it is kind of risky. And this is the case for all algorithms. It's a very common thing that somebody will learn how to game an algorithm and they'll just get greedy like the poster of this thread did. The poster got greedy. The poster was like, wow, this is working great. Okay, now I'm just gonna generate a ton more without even adding any value or even reading them. There are three more comments here, they're worth sharing. So the second comment in this thread is, are the thousands of pages genuinely useful slash necessary to target users and queries with different intent? Pumping out a page per keyword to just try and gobble up as much quote unquote real estate as possible can be seen as a spammy tactic. That's the first thing that's a potential red flag about this approach to me. Obviously I haven't seen it, but the impression from your description is that the website exists more for traffic and SEO manipulation rather than users. That's not going to consistently rank well. The comment after this, using AI at scale can be seen as spam, but using AI in and of itself is not wrong, nor does Google care how you made the page or even if it's helpful or not. Excessive page creation without a subsequent authority built along is definitely not the right move. You need links as your site growths. So like I said, if you have abnormal behavior, the algorithms will look into it more closely. And maybe this behavior doesn't align with the hundreds or thousands of other patterns that Google has seen from other websites. And then Google is like, this is abnormal, this isn't right. And the last comment says, "Using AI to make a lot of low value content at scale is the problem." What you did is no different than doorway pages back in the day. You made a lot of pages that don't provide real value in an attempt I assume to rank for specific keywords. Google doesn't like that and never will. That being said, your domain can come back from it if you get rid of all the old spam content and make an effort to create higher quality content with genuine value. But it is going to take a while. And I'm not sure if anyone knows exactly how long it'll be. Though the comment that I read, the second comment that I read said that it was from March to December. That's how much it was for that person. Back to the other comment that I was reading. In the past, if you got dinged by an algorithm update, you typically had to wait for a refresh to see your site recover. This is a new algorithm. So we'll have to wait and see. Like I said, March to December was what it was for the other commenter. But that's what's going on out there with tons of AI generated pages on websites with the intent of manipulating Google. And the last thing that I want to share, it's adify.app. I discovered this. I made so many podcasts about it. I wrote newsletters about it. My mind was blown. Their site was made a few weeks after the release of chat EPT at the end of December, 2022. The way that it worked, it's a Chrome extension that uses GPT to summarize YouTube videos. The website has a nice layout. The summary is looked nice. And what happens is whenever a user of the Chrome extension creates a summary, uses the tool to get a summary of a YouTube video, that summary is automatically created as a page on. This website, the website is adify.app. It's automatically created as a page on the site. So people started using this. Tons of pages were created, but nothing happened. And then in the summer of 2023, they did a press push. They started getting links, and these links, I think they appeared in Wired and TechCrunch, and these links got them to start ranking. And did they ever start ranking fast? They very quickly, from September to December, went from ranking for like no keywords to 213,000 keywords. And then March came around 2024, like I said, and all these sites started getting hit, all these AI sites started getting hit. So they took down, they wisely took down their pages. And I looked at them at that time. I wanted to see if they would get hit too. They didn't get hit because they took down their pages. And then they put them back up. They put them back up, and a few months later, they were ranking for, I think, 35,000 keywords. That was a couple of months ago, and I looked at them now. I wanted to see what was happening now. And actually, if you're watching on YouTube, I'm sharing a graph of their organic traffic, taken from SEMrush. So they are not ranking for tens of thousands of keywords anymore. They are not ranking for thousands of keywords anymore. They are only ranking for 287 keywords. They only have one keyword in positions one through three on Google, and only five keywords in positions four through 10. And the rest of their keywords are all on or after the second page of Google. They're getting 9,600 clicks a month from Google. And that's compared to, back in February 2024, they were getting 2.7 million clicks a month from Google. The question is, will they be able to recover? So that is the landscape. If you want to try using AI-generated pages to rank on Google for lots of keywords, consider all the things that were just shared. Maybe you'll reconsider doing it. If you do do it, it is why to pay attention to velocity. Does the velocity of page creation match the velocity of other things such as backlinks or engagement? How easily do these pages pass AI detection tools like GPT-0 or there's both GPT-0 and zero GPT. These are two AI detection tools, two different ones with similar names. And they're both very good. So how easily or not easily does it pass these tools? And then it's worth considering. If you're going to try this, is this a money site? Is this a website that's important to you? Is this website connected to Google Search Console with any other important domains? Because if it is, you might not want to try it. Is it easy to have it tracked back to you? It certainly looks like it is risky out there for webmasters who want to try this. But at the end of the day, that's the call of the webmaster. That's just what's happening. These AI-generated pages were an existential threat to Google and Google has put a lot of resources into detecting them. And this is episode 550 of my daily digital marketing podcast, 550 days in a row doing this show. That is wild. I started this 550 days ago. Haven't missed a day. Thank you all so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
