Google's August Spam Update: 4 Sites That Got Wiped Out (Glenn Gabe Case Studies)

E1159: Google's August 2026 Spam Update hit some sites extremely hard.

I break down four case studies from Glenn Gabe showing exactly what Google's August spam update targeted, including scaled AI content, programmatic SEO with little added value, thin affiliate pages, poor user experience, and sites operating in risky niches.

One of the sites lost rankings for more than 200,000 queries.

Another had more than 1.5 million URLs indexed, many of which were lost.

These weren't simply examples of "AI content is bad" or "programmatic SEO is bad." The common thread was scale combined with very little unique value for the searcher.

In this episode:

- A YMYL site that lost rankings for more than 200,000 queries after scaling programmatic pages across countries

- Why the combination of programmatic content and AI-generated copy can become especially risky in YMYL niches

- A massive Amazon affiliate site built largely from Amazon product data

- Why simply recreating merchant information and adding affiliate links can fall under Google's Thin Affiliation policies

- What Google says good affiliate sites need to add beyond information already available from the merchant

- A site with more than 1.5 million indexed URLs that was hit across multiple sections