Will 105 city location pages made with AI trigger the December 2024 spam update?

General Forum
1

I built a site with over 105 location-based pages by zip code, created and edited with AI (ChatGPT) and some human tweaks for each city across the US and Canada. Up until December 2024, the site was doing really well—great visibility, solid organic traffic, and lots of keywords ranking.

But after December 26th, traffic tanked hard. I’ve done a lot of backlink work, but after taking a closer look, I still have about 1,700 backlinks on this 26-year-old Joomla site.

I’m not sure if the location pages triggered the 75% traffic drop (except for keywords, which only dropped about 21%), or if it’s a handful of spam backlinks from China or Russia causing it. I tried blocking both countries, but they seem to find ways around it using other locations to sneak links through image caches.

Anyone else run into something similar? I’m wondering if the AI content or the backlinks are the real issue here.

2

If the content actually adds value and isn’t just straight-up copied from ChatGPT, you should be fine. AI content isn’t an issue if you tweak it, make it useful, and add your own spin.

As long as you didn’t just paste everything directly from AI without edits, it shouldn’t trigger the update.

3

@Ulises
I did copy and paste but I stripped the formatting and pasted as plain text. After that, I made some adjustments—adding words like ‘dazzling’ and changing small things here and there. A few sections might have gone through without much editing, though. Maybe it’s one of those links or some classified ad causing the issue.