Google Can Lose Faith In Your Website (Here's How To Get It Back)

0:00Can Google eventually lose faith in a website? That's what we are exploring today. It's if you put out enough of bad stuff, will Google eventually stop showing your content in search even when you start to put out good stuff? So, I'm going to share Google's stance on this. Then, I'm going to share what recoveries could look like. That's what we got on this episode of the show. This is from Google's John Mueller. John Mueller is Google's search advocate. basically the face of Google search. He was asked about programmatic SEO and gave this response and it's very illustrative. He said, "Regarding the site you describe, it's hard to say, but I worry a bit

0:43because it sounds like a programmatic SEO play where you iterate through a large list of domain names, technologies, and attributes, finding all possible combinations. It's easy for a programmer to do, even easier with code generators now. You end up with tons of pages that have some value, but the overall picture is not that exciting. Expanding it with even more generated data, like what does PHP mean, etc. doesn't make it more useful for the users. And by generated data, he means AI generated text. His post continues, programmatic SEO like this often leads to a site that's either spam, borderline spam, or lowquality. It's easy to spin something up with many pages. It's hard

1:26to provide real value to users. Our systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages. Resolving this tends to take time and significant effort to show the value. For sake of a comparison and timing, you could look at how others in SEO work on resolving issues around spam and core updates. Not to say that your site is spam, but to get a sense of the work and time involved. And I'll be sharing that in a moment. He said, "The key line is our systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good

1:59value to users based on the old pages." And if you're confused by what spam or lowquality means, the two easiest things to think about are click-through rate and pogo sticking. Pogo sticking are people going to these pages from search, then they're dissatisfied. They're going back to the search results to try to find something better. That's pogo sticking. You want to avoid that click-through rate. Do people eventually stop clicking on your results because they know that your site is disappointing? They've come across your site too many times. They want to avoid it. Or maybe your page titles are just bad. It's click the rate in the search

2:35engine results pages. But the result is putting out content that throws off all of these terrible behavioral signals. This really reminds me of the classic fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. A bored shepherd boy looking after sheep shouts wolf just to watch the villagers drop their work and rush to help him. He's laughing. Everyone fell for his prank. He repeats the trick a second time. The frustrated villagers fall for it. They realize they've been tricked again. And

3:03you know what happens on the third time. The third time is actually a real wolf appears and attacks the flock. And the boy screams for help, but nobody believes him. and the wolf destroys the flock, leaving the boy weeping over the consequences of his lies. And it's the same thing with SEO. Searchers get disappointed clicking into your results enough times, they stop going to your results. We saw this happen with WP Beginner. WP Beginner's organic traffic graph has gone down and down and down and down and down because they put out all this content that just disappointed searchers in mass. Searchers stopped clicking. Google's systems stop trusting

3:43the site. It's like, "Okay, this site keeps on putting out content that's disappointing our searchers. Let's really not show them as much. We're going to move really slowly with them in the future." It's the same thing actually for any algorithm. Same thing for social as well. If you just put out enough bad stuff on social media, you have more work to do trying to get your account to a satisfactory place. The problem with programmatic SEO and scaled AI content is these sites put out the

4:15content way faster than a human could. And so really throws off these behavioral signals super fast to the point where it gets really hard to to fix it, but people do fix it. And so that's what I'm sharing next. And there's this post that was doing really well on X from Charlotte Smith about

4:32pruning and then fixing the site. Pruning lots of AI written SEO pages. Charlotte Schmidt said, "We deleted 200 blog posts at the end of last year, and since then, our Google traffic more than tripled. Last year, we published hundreds of AI written SEO pages. Exactly zero hit Google's top 10. This year, we focused on quality, and search just became our number one acquisition channel. 15% of new signups in spring, 20% in July, 25% in August, 36% so far in September. Let's go. Google traffic went from around 1,000 to nearly 4,000 monthly visitors. Here's the playbook we follow now. One, delete first. We killed around 200 thin AI pages with lowquality

5:21backlinks and kept a few dozen worth maintaining. Two, same tools, better inputs. The failed pages were written from models imagination and little input. The new ones are written from data live search volumes, SERs from an SEO API, hrefs or data for SEO and verbatim quotes from real users on Reddit, hacker news, and X every quote linked to its source using the Octalins MCP. That's really smart because it's actually a common SEO recommendation when writing content to do research into your niche using Reddit or using X to see what the streets are saying and then to mirror that language back to the searchers that shows searchers you

6:05understand them. If you're writing bottom offunnel content and that's the next part of this post, you should do a lot of research into what your searchers actually care about, seeing the language they really use. And it's cool that this content links back to the Reddit posts and the X posts and the hacker news posts. That's cool. Number three, write the pages buyers search for best of lists that rank competitors honestly with upto-date pricing breakdowns, alternative pages for tools people are leaving. Number four, customer stories

6:39for recognition and original content. Prisma, Versell, Tally, Postto, Render, Metabase. Original stories like these feed many other blogs and pages, which helps those rank, too. Not to mention great content for socials. Customer stories are amazing. There's a reason that I share so many testimonials for my SEO course, Compact Keywords, at the end of many of these episodes. Not only do they social proof the course, as in, well, other people are having a good experience, so I might have a good experience, but it's cool to see what other people are doing with it. It's useful. It's useful for potential buyers. And number five, review everything. People try to sell you

7:18automated SEO that just posts blogs on autopilot and makes your domain rating grow, but from my experience, it's rather damaging than helpful to your SEO and brand image. Taking the time to read over content and edit is, at least for now, still necessary. I recently open sourced our blog writing process as a skill, and you can get that on GitHub. This post will be in the description for this episode. And so if you go to the post, you can get the skill. Then there's this post from Lily Ray. I shared it a couple episodes ago about recovering from the December 2025 spam update. Lily Ray said, "Excited to see

7:55this site that was hit by the December 2025 spam update is starting to recover. Interesting that their recovery happened just outside of a core update. It took about 5 months after beginning to make fixes to finally see the impact as expected. And if you listen to the helpful content update episode of this podcast, episode 989 of this show, Google's helpful content update destroyed the internet, what actually happened. Lars Lofran on the podcast breaks down in depth how he prunes websites hit by the update and the hard decisions he has to make and then what the recovery timeline looks like. And he goes deep on this. That's a really good

8:36episode. So, don't be the boy who cried wolf with your websites. Remember, according to John Mueller, Google systems can lose faith in a website providing good value to users based on bad old pages. Now, if you want to learn how to do search engine optimization the right way from the beginning so you don't face these issues. So, right from the start, you make a site that is satisfying search intent, throwing off good behavioral signals and going after the types of searches that make you money. If you want to learn how to do that, that's exactly what my SEO course, Compact Keywords, the thing on my

9:12t-shirt, is about compact keywords.com. If you have a site that's struggling, it shows you how to do an SEO technical audit and an SEO content audit to fix that site. Prune those unnecessary pages. It shows you how to make content that satisfies search intent so you're not getting pogo sticking. You're getting much higher click-through rates. How to build highquality links. Most importantly, how to find the types of searches people are using when they're looking to purchase something, use

9:38something, or make a discovery call. Page templates, Google Docs, Google Sheets, written portions. I had a customer, Luke, say this recently. I built a personal skill for Claude by transcribing your course into a very detailed skill that worked really well for me. Last week, I got my first call from a lead that came from a compact keywords page. Then Luke followed up and said, "Just got another lead, two leads in 7 days from my target customer trades from SEO." And here's another satisfied customer of compact keywords. Edward and his compact keywords is the best SEO growth hack method that you can use today. Simply go to compact keywords and

10:19use his uh use his courses cuz it's insane. We got this traction over here and I get meetings pretty much every day. That is Matas. Matas is crushing with the course. So, I hope you'll get it for your business at compactkeywords.com. That's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,166 of the podcast. 1,166 days in a row doing this show. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to

10:59you again tomorrow. Bye now.