SEO for Content Sites: What Three Sites We Run Show

In August, the owner of an information site about insurance, mortgages and banking told r/SEO that traffic had gone from "around 2,000 visits a day" to almost nothing, in a post titled "Vertical crash from 2,000 to zero visits". u/WebLinkr looked the site up and wrote: "This looks like 'Mount AI' if ever I saw one." The same reply asked how the site went "from 2,000 keywords to 24,000 in a month" and said it "does look like a Scaled Content Penalty - that might be wrong." The owner said the biggest losses were seasonal articles. A longer reply by u/kemalios opens with "Google isn't deciding what you can talk about, it's deciding what it can trust," and goes on to say that in YMYL finance "an information blog with no named authors, no credentials, no original data is exactly the shape that gets reclassified."

That warning applies to us too: our three sites are drafted with AI and published fast. Here is how they differ from the site in that thread, and what that doesn't prove. Ours cover entertainment (games, manhwa, card sets), not money or health topics. Every article is checked against the sources it was written from and approved by a person before it goes live. And a client plan caps at 30 articles a month. None of that is immunity: one of our sites lost more than half its daily clicks in late August, and the numbers are below.

Our three content sites, in numbers

These are content sites in entertainment niches, not affiliate sites, so they're closest to yours if you run a niche or ad-supported content site. An affiliate site also has Google's thin affiliation policy to meet, which ours don't test. We don't publish their domains.

Google Search Console, web search, final data; snapshot Oct 13, 2026. Clicks from each property's first day of data (April 10, May 12 and May 31, 2026) to October 10. Articles are new content files, counted in the week they were first committed.

Per article, the game news site has earned about 117 clicks, the manhwa site about 126 and the card game site about 72. Counting full weeks only, the game news site published the most, about 36 articles a week, and peaked earliest, at 7,358 clicks in the week of June 29. The manhwa site published about 23 a week; its best week was 5,621 clicks in mid-August and its latest full week 4,365. The card game site published about 18 a week and lost more than half its daily clicks in late August; our post on whether AI content hurts SEO goes through that drop day by day, and we haven't found the cause.

What we'd do for your content site, step by step

The process is the one we run on our own three sites, with the plan's limits.

1. Audit and fix the site first: speed, indexing, schema and site structure. A content site lives on hundreds of pages being crawled and indexed, so this comes before any writing.
2. Plan from searches. Each article answers a search people make in your niche, chosen for your content plan.
3. Draft, check, approve. AI drafts, our pipeline researches and fact-checks against sources, and a person approves every article before it goes live.
4. Publish up to 30 a month. That's fewer than our own sites publish; how many you get depends on your niche and needs.
5. Watch what earns clicks. The monthly report puts your Search Console clicks and impressions next to what we published and fixed, so pages nobody visits show up.

You keep the code, the content and the domain. Hosting and maintenance are in the monthly price.

What Google is strict about on content sites

Google's helpful content guide lists questions that describe a lot of content sites, including:

• "Are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?"
• "Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?"
• "Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you'd get search traffic?"

Its spam policies add two that hit content and affiliate sites directly. Scaled content abuse is "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users." Thin affiliation is "publishing content with product affiliate links where the product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value."

We publish at volume, so the first question applies to us too. The answer we can give is the process above and the data in the table, including the two sites that are down.

Who this fits, and who it doesn't

It fits if you run a site in a topic you know, earn from ads or affiliate links, and want 20 to 30 well-checked articles a month without managing writers or the technical side. It also fits if your site has slowed down and you suspect indexing or speed.

It doesn't fit if you want hundreds of pages a month; the plan stops at 30. It doesn't fit a finance or health site with no one who has credentials to put behind the articles. The reply quoted at the top named that problem in the finance thread: "an information blog with no named authors, no credentials, no original data is exactly the shape that gets reclassified." That's one practitioner's reading, and we'd raise it before taking such a site on. And it doesn't fit if your growth depends on links or PR, because the plan doesn't include link building.

The plan is $500 for the first month and $300 a month after, with no minimum term. The SEO content service page lists what's included.

How we know this

Written by Elmrank editorial. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Oct 14, 2026.

1. Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, accessed Oct 14, 2026
2. Google Search Central, Spam policies: scaled content abuse and thin affiliation, accessed Oct 14, 2026
3. r/SEO, Vertical crash from 2,000 to zero visits: the frustration of a niche site (comments by u/WebLinkr, u/Ora-Ultima2024, u/kemalios), accessed Oct 14, 2026
4. Elmrank, Search Console data for three sites we run (web search, final data, snapshot Oct 13, 2026), accessed Oct 14, 2026

Email us your site.

We reply within 12 hours with what we'd fix first. Then we run it for you, technical SEO and content: $500 for the first month, then $300 a month for up to 30 articles. You don't need any technical knowledge, and you can cancel any time.

Contact usSee what's included