Ever wondered how much traffic a new website could generate while using AI generated articles? Here’s a breakdown of my experiment that sought to answer this question. The website in question is the very one you’re currently visiting.
AI Generated Website: The Experiment Design
This experiment was designed with the aim of giving the website the best possible chance at success. Below are the strategies that were implemented:
- Transitioning the focus of the website towards artificial intelligence and technology.
- Opting for a SEO-friendly WordPress theme – the ‘Newspaper’ theme for its aesthetic appeal and SEO prowess.
- Investing in the Premium version of Yoast SEO to follow standard SEO practices in article writing.
- Ensuring proper implementation of SSL and caching for better site performance.
- Posting 10 articles daily based on Google Alerts and focusing on major companies involved in AI development.
- Submitting a sitemap to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex.
- Getting the website listed on Google News.
Powering Content with AI: Enter ChatGPT
The main thrust of this experiment was to evaluate the potential of AI generated articles. Queries for generating articles through ChatGPT, an AI developed by OpenAI, were framed as follows:
“Write an article on XYZ”. The criteria: standard SEO formatting, headers, meta descriptions and tags, proper linking, casual tone, active voice, sentence length capped at 19 words, more transition words, and simpler language.
These parameters ensured that most of the generated content adhered to Yoast Premium’s standards, though minor manual tweaking was sometimes required.
Outcome of the Experiment: The Reality Check
Despite the innovative approach, the website barely received more than 10 views per day, showing no signs of a positive trend.
Moving Forward: The Road Ahead
Although the results weren’t promising, the journey continues. The website will continue to host AI generated articles along with manually written ones, though the volume will likely be reduced from the intense pace of 10 articles per day.
Reflections on the Experiment
The underwhelming results of this experiment may stem from the inherent nature of SEO. A handful of dominant websites garner most of the traffic, thanks to the crucial role of backlinks. Spending heavily on backlinks or following traditional backlink-building strategies might help to a degree, but achieving significant popularity seems like a tough challenge in the current landscape. The golden era of traffic floods through links on DMOZ or Yahoo’s customized search results seems to be a thing of the past. The key to success today appears to be quick, initial breakthroughs on trending topics or a lucky popular post on Reddit/LinkedIn linking to your article.
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