On my old tech blog, Google kept showing the site for almost three weeks after a 404-article publish, then cut its impressions by about 90 percent. Bing went on to show the new articles hundreds of thousands of times.
What I did
My tech blog is 7 or 8 years old, and it was already quiet on Google: 15 clicks in four months in mid 2025, its best pages around position 17, and no clicks in the first days of June 2026. On 6 June 2026, as a deliberate test, I published 404 new articles in one day, drafted with AI, and about 100 more over the next two months.
Where
My own tech blog, June to October 2026
What changed
For almost three weeks Google kept showing the blog, a little more than before: about 215 impressions a day from 6 to 25 June, against about 145 a day just before the publish. On 26 June that fell to about 15 a day, and it has stayed there: 10 clicks in the 90 days to 4 October 2026. The fall came five days after I reworked the new articles in bulk (19 to 21 June), so I cannot say which change Google reacted to. One older article moved up, from position 51 to 25. Bing did the opposite: about three months after the publish it showed the blog 731,261 times in four weeks and sent 1,540 clicks, with most of the impressions on three troubleshooting guides.
Did it work
Mixed result
What you should do
On an established site, publish new articles in steady small batches, and add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools before a big launch.
How long it took
Months, and Google has still not come back
A mass publish is putting out a large number of articles at the same time.
Why it matters
Google judges pages, but it also judges the whole site. When a quiet old blog suddenly grows by hundreds of AI-drafted articles in a day, Google does not have to rank them, and here, three weeks later, it almost stopped showing the blog.
Bing showed the same articles within weeks, above all three troubleshooting guides, so the articles could rank. The difference was in how the two engines judged the change.
How to check your own site
Before a big launch, plan a publishing pace that looks like real work: a few posts a week, not hundreds a day.
Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools before the launch, so you can see whether the content can rank at all.
145 to 15Google impressions a day, before the publish vs July to October
731,261Bing impressions in four weeks
Status
Done
What this changed in how I work
Google and Bing can judge the same mass publish in opposite ways. Google still barely shows the new articles (3 clicks since late June); Bing ranked them within weeks. I now launch big batches slowly and watch both engines from day one.
End of Lab entry No. 013
Part of The SEO Lab, an open notebook of real SEO work, published as it happens.Recorded 13 October 2026. Filed under Failures. Everything here comes from work I did myself. If a number looks wrong, ask me how it was measured.
