Eric Siu breaks down what 1,500 sites hit by Google's helpful content update had in common: AI-generated content, heavy AdSense ads, and popups everywhere. Poor user experience, not just thin content, tanked their traffic.
There's this tweet here from Lily Rae. She often will tweet about sites that have been hit by these Google updates, right? She pulled together data from Sistrix and BuiltWith to look at 1,500 sites and that had the greatest percentage decrease between the helpful content update and now. So just for a refresher for everyone, Google's helpful content update, it hit a lot of sites. So BuiltWith indicates that 97% of these sites that got hit, what do you think was the one thing that they had in common? AI-generated content. They all had ads, right? So she says, okay, and also 40% of these sites apparently use AdSense, right? So if you're loading your site with a bunch of popups pops a bunch of ads, that's not a good user experience at the end of the day. That's not helpful content. And so by definition, these sites deserve to get hit, right?
