Ask HN: Has Google started cleaning their search results from AI slop?
I'm maintaining a couple personal pet projects and I've recently noticed in google search console that on both projects impressions and clicks went from 500-700 impressions / 10-15 clicks daily to almost zero in one day. First I thought that I broke something (e.g. added noindex by mistake or so), but everything was good and content was good, fresh and up to date.
I went researching and it turned out Google changed their anti-spam policy and dropped A LOT of links from their index around Oct 26 or so. From what I see is that they're trying to remove a lot of fake abusive AI-generated content from their index. I also had some nice insights and help in google community regarding my problem and they mentioned that they're cleaning stuff.
In general I think it's not so bad to fight with useless AI-generated content, on the other hand my content wasn't that sloppy, it was actually quite useful (at least for me and a few readers), distilled knowledge. But it fell into that "too bad to keep it in the index" criteria :/ I'll work on my projects content, it's not a problem and I've learned the lesson. But I'm wondering how many indie hackers / builders and "SEO hackers" were affected? Many of young products depend on the search traffic so they'll be suffering because their domain / content is not trustworthy. Do you think it's a temporary measure or we'll have higher quality expectations from search engines in the future?