Help with massive GSC drop for adult site.

Had a nsfw domain for years rarely used. Started a niche tube site this year with AI enriched content. Then on Aug 15 onwards gsc position detoriated and traffic dropped massively. I am not able to find root cause, I feel it could be:

1. Google SEO Aug update.
2. Site was consistently hitting resource limits during this period because of meta / anothropic / other bots, and I had to turn on managed challange on CF for a couple of days for all bot and non bot traffic.
3. I had added 20-30k more pages during this period which I later cut down massively from sitemap as it appeared spammy.











I am currently working on boosting quality of content, information gain score specifically. Not sure if will work. Most annoying part is I don't know what is hitting me. Do you guys see any scope for recovery?

You published a lot of low-quality pages in a short time that seemed automated?

Yeah, but I have taken down the ones that seemed clearly automated. Is that the root cause and is there hope for recovery?

How old is your website when you started it? If it's like 2/3 weeks or less, Google jumps in the first weeks for most websites, and after dropping almost to 0, this happens with blogs and adult websites. It takes time.

Screenshot of an adult website released a few weeks ago:


Now it's waiting time

Thank you for support! It was old domain I held for 1-2 years with biolerplate code. Actual development started this year.

Looking at what I can do, like improving UX, AI enriching content further, and putting un-enriched content (that was not in sitemap) in nofollow.

From videos I am watching, I think combination of three things I posted could have destroyed this site. It was under heavy load and timing out in Aug 10-14/15 and I had enabled CF challange for everyone. That might have triggered Google into checking alternative / better sources.

I am wondering if I should start off with a diff domain with diff niche or continue polishing this one.

zocx said:

How old is your website when you started it? If it's like 2/3 weeks or less, Google jumps in the first weeks for most websites, and after dropping almost to 0, this happens with blogs and adult websites. It takes time.

Screenshot of an adult website released a few weeks ago:
View attachment 544172

Now it's waiting time

Click to expand...

Interesting, this actually happened to me on a blog before, and I even posted a thread about it here. Good to know, I won't give up next time I encounter the drop.

I'm having the same problem

H1Hero said:

I'm having the same problem View attachment 544187

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interesting my website start dropping in almost the same time.
Is this some unknown Google update?

hent said:

View attachment 544173


Thank you for support! It was old domain I held for 1-2 years with biolerplate code. Actual development started this year.

Looking at what I can do, like improving UX, AI enriching content further, and putting un-enriched content (that was not in sitemap) in nofollow.

From videos I am watching, I think combination of three things I posted could have destroyed this site. It was under heavy load and timing out in Aug 10-14/15 and I had enabled CF challange for everyone. That might have triggered Google into checking alternative / better sources.

I am wondering if I should start off with a diff domain with diff niche or continue polishing this one.

Click to expand...

I have the same issue with my new CMS v2. There are a few bots that go crazy with scanning, so the best option to fix this is to limit non-good IPs, like Google, Bing, etc., to a maximum of 20–30 database hits per 60 seconds, and a global limit of 1,500 per 60 seconds.

The easiest way is to limit the maximum connections to the database via PHP. Exactly this was the issue I had—some bots using cURL were killing my server, and this update fixed the problem.

If you set reasonable limits, most people won’t be affected, but the bad bots will eventually get tired of the limits and leave.

By the way, is weird because your website stay already 4 months up, i think the issue is when you try to fight the bad bots you kinda affect google to ... you need a class to filter out the good bots and bad bots and limit the mysql connections ... and use cache

All the time, start new ones ... focus on 10/15 of them ...

donartus said:

Interesting, this actually happened to me on a blog before, and I even posted a thread about it here. Good to know, I won't give up next time I encounter the drop.

Click to expand...

Yes, this happens with most new domains. There are two ways to fix it: 1) wait until Google starts to give you some love again, or 2) buy a few backlinks to accelerate the process.

I was checking many keywords on Google in the adult niche with one of my friends over the past few days, and I noticed that most of the websites ranking well are from domains that are 1–2+ years old.

So, the way I see it, Google is currently starting to rank websites with domains that are 1–2 years old rather than very young domains.

But I’m specifically talking about the adult niche.

H1Hero said:

I'm having the same problem View attachment 544187

Click to expand...

Yes, this is depressing when it happens, i happen this many, many times ...

mainceaft said:

interesting my website start dropping in almost the same time.
Is this some unknown Google update?

View attachment 544189

Click to expand...

This month (August) was an update on Google Spam; 2 of my big websites lost 40% of the traffic ... but now it's back to normal ...

mainceaft said:

interesting my website start dropping in almost the same time.
Is this some unknown Google update?

View attachment 544189

Click to expand...

I think it's because of the google's ai spam update
I want to add, it's hard to say, because at the same time Google introduced the "go to" style of links, which broke the rank trackers and other simmilar bots too.
I used ai on this site, but what's interesting is that a page that I put a lot of effort into is still number one.

Seeing last week closely, I see slim hope for recovery... it is might be just a fluff, but impressions going from 10-20 to 60 is a postive sign. I will wait for a week and improve the content and UX meanwhile. Submitting site to Yandex / Bing / DuckDuckGo to ensure whatever page hits are there, have solid UX. I don't know who uses them but at the moment all of my clicks are from Yandex lol.

I was hit with this almost exact scenario (scrapped content site). Shortly before the 0 traffic at 21st, there was a massive influx of traffic causing downtime. I went aggressive with fail2ban blocking lots of googlebot traffic. those pages I found at 27th are shown in search console as 5xx. Lets see if I get traffic back or not.

It could be that google did not estimate that it would completely break scale of websites by bringing them up in results causing the massive influx, specially crawlers that spam site based on google. Don't see any other reason for the timing of these events. I was in particular getting hit from spam from Anthropic and Meta crawlers. Content Signals / blocking them indicually from AI settings / etc was worthless on cloudflare.. I had to enable managed challange for everyone using WAF.

Traffic seems improving, but the search queries I am recieving are quite bad. They are not the same genre as I used to recieve.




It does give me hope. But when things started to finally improve on google's end, CF did me very dirty.

I was using their free database and had billions of daily row reads. For context 1 query can have multiple row reads and I had very unoptimized queries, where some used to scan millions of rows to do joins per user request. CF always had free limit of 5 million but never enforced it for years. They somehow decided to enforce this like yesterday.

I did lot of query optimizations and bought my usage to few 40-50 million (from 10-20 billions) but that would still blow up my site in middle of day. They have a paid 5$ plan, but the monthly database limits were still not practically useful (30 billion a month). After spending ~2 days of engineering to optimize the queries and exploring their plans, I decided to move to my own server which is a far cheaper option. There is also per per use add on if I went with cloudflare that compulsory. But since these guys disrupted my daily job, I could not trust their pay per use model, who knows if they decide to spam me with legit looking bot traffic to get some extra $$. Plus any bad query / mistake I did could burn out monthly database limit triggering pay per use.

I am bringing this up because this will cost me dearly in coming weeks or months...

check if safesearch filter hit you hard recently. adult niches take huge hits whenever google updates their safesearch direction so even if manual actions show clear, imperssions can drop off a cliff overnight.

Thanks, I don't see this explicity in dashboard. Anyway to double check?