Story

I've been experimenting with parasite SEO (ranking Reddit/Quora threads on Google) and noticed my traffic kept dying after a few days.

To see if this was systemic, I built a custom scraper and tracked 800 unique UGC URLs across high-competition commercial keywords for a month.

The data showed a massive "churn" rate: Out of the 611 threads that dropped out of the Top 10, 56.1% were completely rotated out of the SERPs within 48 hours. Only a tiny fraction survived more than 2 weeks.

I published the raw CSV data from the study here if anyone wants to run the URLs through Ahrefs and look for backlink patterns: https://contentrankr.com/ugc-churn-data

Standard rank trackers check weekly, so you don't even realize a thread is dead until days later. I also embedded a tiny free tool on that page using the Serper API where you can paste a Reddit URL and instantly check if Google has dropped it from the index.

Curious if anyone else has looked into the "half-life" of Google's new UGC rankings?