Some sites lost nearly all Google traffic in early September
Two well known SEOs report near total traffic losses, and bulk-made pages may be the link.
Two well known SEOs say Google changed something in early September that it never announced, and a handful of sites lost almost all their search traffic.
Glenn Gabe posted first, after a week of emails and calls from site owners sharing their Search Console screenshots. He puts the hit around September 3 into September 4, and says some sites have no visibility at all now. A few are not even ranking for their own brand names. He noted that one site shows an almost 100 percent drop in third party visibility data.
Marie Haynes replied that she is seeing the same thing, though she thought the drop started September 2. She has seen a few sites with what she called devastating traffic drops. Gabe answered that it was good to hear she was seeing it too.
The one clue so far
Marie Haynes has only looked closely at one affected site, and it was full of programmatic doorway pages. Those are pages made in bulk from a template, built to catch a search rather than answer a question. Because of that, she thinks this may be the aftermath of Google's spam update from a few days earlier, in late August.
Gabe floated other possibilities. Some affected sites are in what he calls ultra-YMYL categories, meaning money or health topics, so he is not sure Google intended this. He also raised the chance it was a reviews system update, which Google now runs quietly and no longer confirms. Marie Haynes wondered about new Gemini models feeding into Google's ranking systems, then set that aside after finding the bulk pages.
Nobody knows which of those is right. Google has not confirmed any update, and this follows earlier signs that results were shifting.
What to do
Open Google Search Console, click Performance, set the date range to cover late August through mid September, and look for a cliff in clicks around September 2 to 4. If your line is flat, you were not caught in this and you can stop here.
If you did drop, look at what kind of pages you publish. The one site anyone has examined in public was stuffed with template pages spun out at scale. That is not the same as writing real articles regularly. If you have a pile of near-duplicate pages that swap a city or a keyword and say nothing new, that is the thing to cut.
This is two people reporting so far, both experienced, both looking at real Search Console data from site owners. It is not a confirmed Google update, and it may never be confirmed.
There was some unconfirmed update that Google pushed out in early September (around 9/3 into 9/4) that hammered some websites.
Have only looked deeply at one and it had loads of programmatic doorway pages.