Programmatic SEO and Google Dance

[Hanuman]

I have a one-year-old blog with around 45 posts, and they brought between 40-70 visits a day on average.

Late last week, I worked on a programmatic SEO strategy, and published close to a 1000 new blog posts over the course of 2 days.

Now since yesterday, the search traffic on the site is down to 0.

Here is what I noticed: When I search for specific keywords I used to rank for, I still see my site ranked in the top 2-3 results. I also tried with third-party SERP scraping tools to make sure the results were not personalized for me.

And it's not an analytics script issue either since direct visits are still being tracked.

I am still waiting for the latest day reports from GSC to see if my impressions/clicks are down here as well. One theory I have is that my SERP positions have dropped a bit (but again, I cannot verify this as I still see my site ranked #1 for a few keywords)

But I am curious about what could this be. If my page is still ranking for keywords that it used to rank for, and my analytics is working - what else could it be?

Does the fact that I added a thousand new posts cause some kind of Google Dance? Hoping I did not mess up adding so many pages at one go.

 

[Smith]

What kind of keywords are you talking about? For example are they comparisons (___ vs ____), information terms, branded terms, etc? And are you talking about US SERPs or SERPs in a different country/language?

 

[Hanuman]

They are mainly US serps, and related to a keyword pattern. For example, "iPhone 15 specifications", "iPhone 14 specifications", etc.

 

[Darth]

Sounds like the antithesis of the content that Google says they want to promote with the HCU and Oct update. It's nothing new, it exists in thousand of places they have indexed already. Why would they rank it?

 

[Hanuman]

I understand your point. But I don't think it's the HCU or any of the recent updates. My pages still appear to be ranking on Google in the top 5 - and yet, no clicks are coming through. The analytics is working.

The only plausible theory I have is that these are low-volume keywords, and maybe my average position dropped by just 1-2, and is still enough to bring the traffic to a halt.

But it's still improbable that I am not seeing even one click although I am still ranking.

God, wish I could share my keyword and site here so I could identify the real issue here.

 

[Smith]

I'm seeing something similar.... basically, impressions are still there but clicks aren't coming through... not as dramatic as you describe (...yet anyway) but it's still happening.

One hypothesis: The terms that are still getting impressions but dropped in clicks may have been impacted by SGE. In other words, maybe they are just informational terms (like the ones you describe) that can be easily answered by SGE.

Any chance that could be your issue?

 

[Ryuzaki]

One theory would be that you're modeling behavior that's being exhibited by AI sites right now. And while some AI sites can flourish for a little while, many many more are dead in the water at the start once Google starts crawling and indexing.

I would imagine Google classifies your site first, like "Is this a content site or an ecommerce site? Because ecommerce sites roll out a lot of products all the time and we're fine with that. But content sites have zero reason to be rolling out 1,000+ posts at once."

Another thing to consider is if you had 50 articles and then you added 1,000, you've just taken the page rank you had flowing through those 50 articles and vastly reduced it by spreading it across an extra 1,000 posts. I'm sure that after Google maps out the link graph they have to calculate more than one iteration around it in terms of letting page rank "settle" into their new locations. It's like taking 50 glasses of water that were full and then spreading all that water equally across 1,050 glasses now.

 

[Hanuman]

Thanks everyone. Turns out my analytics script (Clicky, not GA) randomly decided to get removed from my blog. I have no idea how it happened.

I see the graph running that day till 2pm or so and then fall flat.

And I thought my analytics was working because it did when I tested by visiting the blog..I think the script was still running in a cached version of the blog.

Anyway, I cleared all the cache from Cloudflare and installed the script again, and the traffic is now showing up again.

While it's weird how the script got removed all by itself, I'm happy at least it had nothing to do with any Google update. Hope all the new articles start ranking soon.