Today I’m sharing why I lost blog traffic & what I did to fix it. What happened to my blog in 2024, came as a complete surprise to me. I’ve been blogging since 2011, and have taken care to ensure good SEO practices since 2020. With almost 2000 blog posts, I was getting a good amount of traffic each week. Then when the Q1 Google Update happened in 2024, I lost almost 75% of it.
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My Blog’s SEO History
Traffic came easily back in the day. In 2011 and 2012, my blog was getting over 100k views per month. That dropped massively towards 2017 though, after a google update I never really understood. At that time I didn’t have the SEO knowledge or confidence to do anything about it, so I just carried on.
During lockdown, I spent time learning more about SEO and working on improving my content. I used Yoast initially, but moved to RankMath Pro in the end as I felt it was a better fit for blogs. I’ve used RankMath since then, and given the work I’d put into SEO since 2020, I’d seen an increase in traffic in the period leading up to February 2024. By this time, my weekly page views was at around 2000.
By March 2024, this had dropped to around 600 page views per week, and I had no idea why. I didn’t have the time to do anything about it back then, and hoped it would improve naturally, once the new google update settled down. (Rumours were rife that google were in the process of penalising websites which used AI, but I honestly didn’t think that was the issue in my case, as I hand wrote all of my content, aside from a few guest posts.
Why I Lost Blog Traffic Thanks to a Google Update
Fast forward to August 2024, and things hadn’t improved. It was the Summer Holidays so I was home with my son a lot. He’s classically autistic and needs eyes on him at all times. This left me unable to truly concentrate on writing, so instead I began looking into SEO for existing posts, and how they correlated with the 2024 google updates.
I noticed that posts which had been doing well last year and were now getting no traffic, were all guest posts. Closer inspection of them left me realising they were all very generic. By this time I knew for sure that Google was penalising websites which used AI, so I ran each of these guest posts through Quillbot to check for AI, and sure enough they were all pretty much exclusively AI generated.
How to Increase Blog Views
What followed was 6 months of intensive rewriting and resubmitting URLS for reindexing, in the hope it would boost blog traffic again. It was painful, but I stuck with it. By Mid August, I’d rewritten 20 of the previously well-ranking posts, and submitted them to google for reindexing. You can clearly see the increase in traffic when I did this, below.
Ignore the huge spikes in traffic on the above image. I’m assuming those are from when my website was crawled by google’s bots. You can clearly see on the above screenshot that my traffic was around 2000 views per week in Jan-Feb, then after being crawled, it drops massively in March. Then after I put in the work in August, it’s crawled again and increases thereafter.
Removing AI Content to Boost Blog Traffic
I decided not to just delete the AI content I’d published inadvertently. Instead, I rewrote it, so I didn’t lose referral traffic or have broken links. By October, I’d rewritten all AI generated content for the past year, and I feel this shows in my traffic. I went about this by initially copying and pasting a blog post into Quillbot, and if it showed as AI generated, I would rewrite it myself, so it was human generated, and used RankMath for SEO support.
Once each post was rewritten, I’d submit the URL to google for reindexing. The entire process has been a learning curve for me. I now screen every single potential guest post for AI generation and also duplicate content before I accept it, and will turn down posts which show more than 20% AI or duplication. (The AI detectors aren’t perfect, so I allow a small threshold). This system has worked for me.
How to get Traffic to Your Blog
Once AI content is removed from your blog, you won’t magically see a huge jump in traffic unless you’ve ticked all of the other SEO best practice boxes. So now I’ve explained why I lost blog traffic & what I did to fix it, I figured it was a good time to list some other things that will help people wondering how to increase blog views.
This past 6 weeks, I have barely worked due to illness and school holidays. This also shows in my traffic. You can see how important it is to regularly publish content by the drop in my traffic at the end of March.
So there you have it – How AI tanked my website traffic, and what I did to fix it. Feel free to get in touch if this approach helps you – I’d love to hear from you! Finally, let me know if you have any additional tips on how to get traffic to blog posts.
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