Types of Sites That Were Affected by Recent Google Updates

Sites that got nuked in the past two months

Google bombarded us with three different updates over the past two months. First there was the Helpful Content Update (August 20), followed by the September Core Update (September 12), and then finally the Product Review Update (September 20).

There are winners and losers every time Google releases an update. In today’s post I’m going to analyze the types of sites that lost organic traffic in the last three updates and show you what to do with your own site so you can avoid getting hit by the next one.

Types of sites that were affected

The three recent Google updates were focused on punishing sites that produce low-quality, unfocused, and undifferentiated content. Sites that don’t offer additional value to the reader outside of what other sites are offering lost TONS of traffic over the last two months.

Since most of you are running Authority Sites, I’ll start with the types of product review sites that were hit before moving on to the types of commodity content sites that were hit as well.

Low-quality review content

If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now. “Everything” sites that review random, unrelated products have no chance of competing in the SERPs.

The “everything site” ship sailed a long time ago, but the recent updates hammered the final nail in the coffin. Low-effort and low-authority sites that don’t have a clear niche have no chance and are effectively dead in the water.

Extremely high-quality sites with tons of domain authority and excellent on-page SEO like The Wirecutter are the only ones that are going to survive in the next few years.

Let’s analyze a few product review sites that lost traffic after the updates:

Producz.com lost 52% of its organic traffic.

It’s not hard to see why.

The categories section on their site lists everything from TV and audio to health and beauty.

I’ve said this a million times before, and I’ll say it again: