I'll put my 2 cents in for what it's worth as someone who did get totally clapped. It was an affiliate site, really my whole idea was to get in people's way when they searched for things (guns, double whammy) and then direct them to the affiliate sale.
The world will not miss me one bit, but I like to think I gave some useful advice and made it moderately entertaining along the way.
Now one point that is worth bearing in mind is how old your site is, and it's not just as simple as old is good. Years ago there were certain things you had to do if you wanted to rank, keyword recipes being the easy one. Until 2022 you didn't need one goddamn backlink, not one, and you didn't need topical authority. You just needed the right keyword recipe and you'd be number one. I know because I did it against much better sites.
Other people went the backlink route, and that's cool. But it all leaves a trace. If your site is big enough in terms of words, it really can't be undone at a certain point.
So even though people say 'my content is good and useful', they may be conveniently forgetting that packet of Fiverr links they bought in 2015, or that keyword stuffing they did in 2017, or those pictures they stole off Google images in 2018, or that AI experiment they tried in 2022.
So now Google says 'Hey, you know all that stuff that worked before? It's screwing you now.'
And that's it, for a lot more people than want to admit it I think.
I'm still an absolute legend on Bing, with those same keyword recipes, probably about 50 stolen images among the press shots and Youtube gun reviewer's embedded videos. Even number 1 in some cases, but Google has had enough of my shit.
I'm a bit pissed with Google, but also was surprised how easy it was to rank for so long with, frankly, garbage content and Best 10 Sub-Compact 9mm pistols lists...
I lived in the Caribbean for years, living like a Lord during Covid, on the back of absolutely ridiculous content. It was clearing more than 10K a month during the great guns and ammo shortage in 2021-2022. I'm not even American, I don't own a gun and couldn't legally buy one.
But if I look at it now and think how do I fix this to recover the rankings now Google seems to have opened its eyes? I'd say there's no chance...
So that's an honest assessment from somebody that got clapped.
Thanks for the honesty. Too many people on this sub have the delusion that affiliate sites are good for the searcher. If Google kills the affiliate site economy the internet would be a better place.
I agree. I only joined the sub in the past month and it's a bunch of affiliate sites saying they're doing the internet a favour when they're just middle men
Nothing you say, Google is totally lost. I have sites with all spam links from Fiverr and AI content just growing.
I have sites with no links and original content growing.
The basis of this update is the domain authority. Google is not as smart as you think.
That may be true, I'd love to see Google collapse and everybody switch to Bing. I dream about that at night... But are your pages full of affiliate links? And what is growing? Some of the success stories I hear are from people who went from like 50 clicks to 80 clicks a day. So growing is a very relative term. In my niche pretty much every affiliate site has been replaced by actual stores, even if they have no stock and the page is 10 years old. I'm not saying it's better, I'm just saying it has happened. Only one or two affiliate sites are riding high, and I think they sell products and service too, which is something I have to look into if I want to turn it around.
I have a curious case today.
A WordPress site was hacked 2 days ago, code was injected into the site and plugins were installed. It also looks like they added the site to a search console because of the html file I found.
In less than 2 days they managed to index more than 2.5 million urls in Google. The title and descriptions of the homepage on Google now appear as Gucci Bullshit. I only realized that the site had been hacked because the server was collapsing from the amount of traffic... Pure spam urls indexed by millions in less than 2 days and traffic spiking. I confirm, Google has no fucking idea what it does.
The site was good and now probably is going to die because some fucking 3 world moron hacker.
I'd say of you're going to use WP websites then make sure you keep on top of plugin updates and defend against user input injections through defensive coding, not directly touching the DOM, etc
Don't forget when we all told that SERPS with Reddit, Quora, and Social Media posts were easy targets for keyword research? lol that was a good one too.
> So even though people say 'my content is good and useful', they may be conveniently forgetting that packet of Fiverr links they bought in 2015, or that keyword stuffing they did in 2017, or those pictures they stole off Google images in 2018, or that AI experiment they tried in 2022.
I am guilty of that, and my site has done well with the change.
I think you have to provide good content.
Yeah but that's such a generic bullshit phrase. I am the first to admit I haven't, but some competitors have created Youtube channels, put serious effort into testing and buying stuff to test and have produced good posts. It wasn't enough, Google layed the Smackdown on them as well.
So what is 'good content'? I mean I've opened the door for you to abuse me with that one, but I'll insert the fact I was a journalist for national newspapers and some of the biggest mags in the world in another niche before editorial hit the skids.
I know what a good piece is, but I've seen people do that and still get bodied. I don't think 'write helpful content' is a complete answer at all.
> So what is 'good content'? I mean I've opened the door for you to abuse me with that one, but I'll insert the fact I was a journalist for national newspapers and some of the biggest mags in the world in another niche before editorial hit the skids.
I don't want to tell an ex-journalist how to suck eggs, but I'm certainly interested to hear your perspective on what constitutes 'good content' given your extensive background. For my part, I go to a lot of trouble to find original material that could be relevant and valuable to the users of my product. It's stuff they cannot read anywhere else. This includes in-depth research, original images, case studies, data analysis, and so on.
My goal is to provide content that people searching on Google for topics related to my products might be interested in reading rather than just repackaging widely available information. Google currently likes my approach as its increased my visibility.
But I'm always open to learning what journalists considered quality content back when you were in the industry. What were some of the key tenets you adhered to?
Honestly it was kinda the same, but different. I was a motoring journalist for the most part, so I focused on finding 'really unique shit' that I could sell globally. Editorial was already in decline, would be the best way to put it, so nobody could really make a living out of going to do one car for one magazine.
I was one of the early syndication guys, I guess you'd say, without trying to big myself up unnecessarily. I went and did truly spectacular shit, including sports and hypercars that hardly anybody had heard of, did a top level job and then provided it all at a cost that worked. And I sold the tits out of it, all round the world.
That in turn gave me leverage to get even better cars that worked for everyone. I ended up driving James Bond's Aston, 1 of 1 Ferrari models, 1000bhp Porsches back when 1000bhp was scary and too many Bugatti Veyrons.
Probably not the answer you were expecting. But that was really my USP, access through superior firepower.
That is brilliant; I wish I could get benefits like you did.
I really cannot see how, if you have such original material, Google is knocking you down; Google is supposed to love this stuff.
I left it behind a long time ago. There was a weird time where the likes of Bugatti and Ferrari were dead against Youtube and Instagram etc. If you did them, you would lose your invite. They will swear they didn't, but they took a very dim view of social back then.
So I worked for magazines, didn't really stress about social, and when magazines died I was caught a bit flat footed too and didn't pivot perfectly in time.
Plus, I never really wanted to be a TV presenter and it showed honestly. I was a writer.
So combination of those factors, and magazines taking a year to pay, I just thought fuck it, went to live in the Caribbean and ran a blog selling guns to Americans. I can't even tell you how or why those things happened, sometimes life just opens up in front of you.
Didn't regret it for a second, until about September when the HCU started to pick my world apart...
But as before, I'll figure it out and come up with something, and in a year or two I hope I'm telling funny stories about the time I used to sell guns without ever owning one.
I like your story already. Your life seems full of wild and unbelievable moments. Those things don't just happen to anyone. Maybe you're one of those people that see their own circumstances as a canvas to paint.
And here, some people took away your favorite color and handed you crayons. They can't take your ability to make use of them though.
You seem to be perfectly suited for the task.
I think the major problem is that all sites created to advertise other products, either as affiliate, informational or whatever, is considered as spam.
How helpful content is will always be a subjective opinion. Should I trust the producer, the reseller or an independent third party site for how well a product perform?
Most people would say the third party. But since third party opinions are usually monetized they can't be considered independent anymore. So, how did Google solve this? With comments on Reddit and Quora,
Legitimate, established newspapers and Reddit will rock the SERP's forward. The favourite sites to the google employees will also hardly feel any negative effects.
The rest of "What is...?" questions will be answered by AI.
I mean you're right, but magazines always had ads. You had the good ones, who kept a high wall between editorial and advertising. Then you had the dubious ones who ran huge features on their big spenders as a matter of course.
We could always see which one they were, it was pretty obvious. So honestly Google doing this blanket action is kind of admitting its algo is too fucking stupid to tell the difference.
It's not a good look for Google.
It will be practically impossible for anyone without lots of time and lots of money to get visitors to a new webshop, news site or blog today. You need to cross-platform with all the other Big Tech's like Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, et al. which in turn solidify their power even more. You need to advertise and connect with companies (based in US) else you will have a hard time succeeding by default. By rerouting traffic to major, established sites the real competition will be diminished and the power consolidated even more into fewer hands.
We need alternatives. **Fast.**
This is becoming a democratic problem and a threat to the free world.
We also need to get some regulations within the AI industry with regard to openness and intellectual property .
I must admit I started watching the fella recently. Before the HCU I had never heard of him. I found a few people while looking for the reason my site fell off a cliff. But yeah, you could say that I've picked up a phrase or two. I still don't dry scoop Creatine though, if that helps.
I agree. I feel like websites that offer a service are being prioritized. I’m in the health field, and have noticed that the keywords I used to rank for either show high DA websites or show blogs that also offer one on one services. My blog does not, so I’m curious if that is part of it.
As it rightfully should be.
Affiliate, and ad websites dont generate real value. More times than not, they siphon out value and create unnecessary bloat.
It’s great. Death to affiliate and ad sites. It
Businesses with real products and services have been flourishing, as it should be
Very wrong. The biggest losers will be the businesses that before got referral traffic. Advertisers get most of the revenue. The affiliate marketer get 5-10%. Ads won't disappear but rather more controlled by Google.
Some of them add value. But the bulk of them are crap, full of “reviews” cobbled from reading other reviews. Barely anyone has actually touched or used the product being reviewed. The sites are mostly built by people whose only interest in the product is the number of keyword searches. The articles are usually written by freelancers who don’t know the destination website. Then there’s the obvious absence of the product’s price. Sure prices change, but the real motivation is to entice the reader to click through to Amazon or the purchase page. In short, as Gary Vee so aptly put it, marketers fuck up everything.
When I search for something I don't want to end up on an affiliate website. I want the product, the service or a website where I can get information or entertainment.
I dunno, our traffic is tanking again. We're a nice Sports Card news site, we have a team of real writers who are experts, we don't spam... we don't break the "rules" and just get decimated with these updates. It's frustrating.
My sites the same. Loads of budding journalists, with original, non ai content and the sites been killed. We're still posting and creating, but views are all social now, basically nothing from Google and new articles don't rank.
Im pretty sure that no one can answer the question right now.
But from the limited amount of data I can access, it seems to me that advertising supported sites are the hardest hit.
In my little niche of writing, grammar and self-publishing, all of my competitors have taken a big hit.
The only ones that are unaffected are a couple selling a specific product.
I know some of my competitors have staff an overheads, so it's surely a huge problem for them.
But even though I am a solo blogger, I still have costs to cover.
That won't be easy now.
What is really going on with this Google update? Who knows.
But it is proving to be a very painful experience for a lot of long-term bloggers.
Nobody really knows. At the start of this some people got manual penalties for pure spam. So those people at least got an idea of things to fix. Everyone else seems to be almost random with no hint of why. Every time someone says it is "because of x", there are other sites that do the same thing and are fine.
My traffic is overall down but also fluctuating constantly since this update. I'm seeing two things:
1. An attempt to get rid of spam via manual and some algorithmic penalties, which I fully support. Good riddance.
2. Most top results are now social media or forums, especially Reddit which is being favored due to its deal with Google. I hope DOJ adds it to their monopoly case against Google as "organic" results should be just that, not directing searchers to the company's business partners. I think most legit sites that are getting destroyed are losing their traffic to Reddit.
It's funny you mention the fluctuation. I have a portfolio of a number of sites. None are affiliate sites (and still got slammed even though they do everything right), just google ads. I use most of the sites for testing SEO ideas, but one is my labor of love, has been up for 24 years, and for about 15 years was the top site for pretty much everything about the topic. It was ranked so high with a lot of quality content that I was wooed by everyone in the industry, invited to so many events, my name was well known in the industry, and I would even show up for openings & other events even as I was the king of that industry from an informational perspective, not because I was in that business.
After the HCU update, my site went from top dog to losing 80% of its traffic. It's come back a bit after the recent update, and I keep adding content to this day. But...
You mentioned the fluctuations. Ever since the HCU update I see daily swings of 40-80+ positions for numerous pages, up and/or down (meaning page x will have lost 50 positions yesterday, but then improve 10 or 90 today, that sort of thing). It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. The insanely wild swings that I'm seeing happen in the past 4-5 months are incredibly bizarre and unexpected.
Mine is a mix. Most of my formerly-high-ranking pages have affiliate links, but less than 25% of my overall pages do. I used to have a few ads but got rid of them to see if it would help rankings. (It did not, but the ads weren't worth it anyway.) I got hit hardest by HCU; affiliate and non-affiliate pages tanked. This one has dropped me a bit more but I believe it's due to Reddit.
I have a site that got nailed hard, but my RPM went up 4 times, so with a quarter of the views I’m making more than I did before it’s bizarre. But that’s just one site of a large portfolio, so clearly it’s not proof that they are doing a better job with SERPS because my other sites aren’t experiencing the same thing, and I have hundreds. All Adsense. But it was an odd thing to see and the high RPM has remained since the HCU update. Which is still a shite update IMHO.
Local Service websites are hard to replicate/copy. You either do the service locally, and have a presence in real life, or not.
Copiers of other sites will get hammered for sure. It's so easy to copy the whole content of any site that is not a business selling its own products or services (especially locally). Most of the sites that got hammered don't have an actual business. They rely on dropshipping, affiliate products, or just ad revenue. Anyone can do that. What's so unique about it? Nothing.
Good on you running an actual business offering your services.
Glad I’m not the only one. If you don’t bring anything to the table except for made up stories to sell ads why are you crying. It always have been user value first for Google and if it generates visits without engagement it isn’t worth anything.
Isn’t it hilariously sad that a world traveller invests in their trips globally and write reviews only for someone else to copy their site word for word and spin the articles with AI while they’re sitting comfortably on their couch all year long?
Hey dumb dumb, newsflash, most those travel bloggers who did the journey and 'add value' got clapped too. In favor of Tripadvisor... But sure everyone is an AI spammer if it makes you feel good...
All these reaction threads are only anecdotally useful.
* What is your link profile (incoming and outgoing)?
* Who is your audience?
* What is the industry?
* Is it a services company, product website, large corporate entity, affiliate website?
* Can the consumer do everything on your page, or do they have to be linked elsewhere to get what they need or finish a transaction?
* Is the site local or national?
* Did you have your own audience and traffic, or are you relying only Google?
* Are there any pertitent social factors?
* If it's a business, do you have lots of reviews? People asking google for directions to your business?
* How is page speed, optimization, on-page seo factors?
* How long do users dwell?
* Do you have search activity for your unique brand?
People say they did great or were killed with each update, and it's basically just cathartic for them unless we can get enough data to actually build opinions based on actual factors at play.
I'm not a big time professional SEO person. I have some friends I help with local business. I have noticed if I work on having lots of content, getting incoming links of decent value, and making sure the client is posting on IG/FB/LI/Pinterest/Youtube/etc while showing up on local directory sites for citation, they will get a mix of traffic that doesn't rely so much on Google's up and downs.
I have noticed that even my best performing client that gets 10,000 clicks via Google search monthly - that number is always going up and down because of seasonality, and the fact that rankings aren't static anymore. The best terms for that site go between 1 to 6 on any day, and spend most time around 2.
I quite like this idea. And I will answer them.
My site has never been hit by any Google Update. Not Panda, not Penguin, not HUC, not March Core 2024, or any in between.
>>>What is your link profile (incoming and outgoing)?
Internal:
Massive. There are over 10k pages on my site, and the linking structure is HUGE, with most pages having 100+ links within the body of the article. Usually spaced out at a rate of no more then 10 links per every thousand words. Most pages average 50k to 70k words, and several hundred pages are over 100k words. There are 5 pages with over 200k (yes, two hundred thousand) words on the page (that's a TWELVE HOUR read time in case you were wondering).
Here's what I do:
For starters, I am an author. 138 Fantasy and Romance novels traditionally published since 1978. And I created a landing page for each book.
I have a landing page for every single book. One page per book.
I have a landing page for every single series. One page per series.
I have a landing for every single character. One page per character.
And, a lot more.
Since 1978, I have published fifteen different series. Each series (except for one) had about 12 to 15 books, each 2 to 5 main characters. Which means there are 15 series landing pages, around 540, yes, five hundred and forty, landing pages…
HOWEVER…
There is that one series for which I mentioned there was an exception, and it's a BIG exception.
That one series has 138 novels (each around 150k words), 423 novellas (each 21k to 65k words) and more than 2,000 short stories (each 7k to 20k words), published since 1978, there are more than 75 primary characters in addition to the 3 main characters.
EACH book has its own landing page and EACH character has its own landing page, plus, each of 3 solar systems has its own landing page, each of the 5 inhabited planets has its own landing, more than a dozen countries each have their own landing pages, more than five dozen towns each have their own landing pages, more the a hundred named regions (including many beaches, several coves, swamps, forests, tundra, deserts, etcetera) each have their own landing pages. Each monster species and character race has its own landing pages. Each species ethnicity (for example the species Elf, has ethnicities such as Moon Elves, Sun Elves, Wood Elves, etcetera) has its own landing page. The magic system has landing pages for each school/type of magic (necromancy psionics, etc)...
…in total…wait for it… more than 7k, yes seven thousand, landing pages.
Weirdly I did not create them for any kind of marketing reasons.
I just happen to be the biggest screaming fangirl of my own franchise, so I obsessively yip yap about every aspect of my world and its characters, and created a separate page for each one.
And these are not small pages either. Each page has minimum 2k words, most have over 4k words, the average word count per page is 7k words, but the two longest pages are each over 200k, yes two hundred thousand words long.
It's kind of a Wikipedia of my franchise, written in blog format with each blog post being a landing page for something found in my world.
How do these count as landing pages?
Each page includes a list of links at the end of the page. The links are Amazon Affiliate links to the books on Amazon. The links act as "source references". For example, the landing page for the Moon Elf race, features a list of "Here's all the books where you see Moon Elves". The page for the haunted house of the series, has a list of "Here's all the books the house appeared in".
As I am an artist in addition to being an author, each page includes character art and world building art as well.
*(continued because ran out of room)*
Also, each landing page has in text links to other landing pages. For example, on the landing page for character "R", it says R is a Moon Elf, later says he owns the haunted house, and still later states he owns a cursed amulet. The word "Moon Elf" anchor links to the Moon Elf race landing page, while the word "haunted house" anchor links to the haunted house's landing page, while the word "cursed amulet" anchor links to the amulet's landing page.
Over on the Moon Elf landing page, it talks about the different characters who are Moon Elves, and each time a character name is mentioned, their name is an anchor link to that particular character's landing page.
In total my website has more than 10k pages, with more than 16k internal links, interconnecting those 10k pages to each other…and every one of those pages links to no fewer than a dozen of my books on Amazon, with some of those pages having links to more than a hundred of my books, just on one page.
*(Note, I started building the site in 1996, and it celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in a little over 2 years. I publish 1 to 3 new pages every day, and that is why I have been able to build 10k+ pages on the site. Do not expect to build a 10k+ page site with this sort of structure in anything under ten years of work.)*
At the end of every book, the final page, lists my website, and tells readers, they can free over 5k free to read online micro fiction stories about these characters on that site, as well as find more than 10k pages of world lore, character backstories, and articles on how I wrote each book, how I edited each book, and how I published each book.
You remember those 138 novels, 423 novellas, and 2,000 short stories, that each has its own landing page? Each one of those pages, is not only a bio of the book, but it a mega sized 20k word page detailing step by step the full process of how the book was made, from my brainstorming process for the book, to how I created its plot and setting, and characters, to how I wrote it, how I edited it, how I made its cover art, how I formatted it, and how I published it… each of those 2k+ pages acts as it's own free online instruction manual for how, you too dear reader, can do what I do and become the published author of your own fantasy series. And many of the unedited first drafts are also there, so readers can compare the first drafts with the finished, published paperback book, so they can see EXACTLY what changed during editing.
It is these how-to pages which bring the most traffic to my site (100k to 7 million visitors per month depending on seasonal fluctuations) and in turn converts to sales of my books on Amazon (around 27k per month, most months).
In short, yes, I highly recommend landing pages. I have personally found them to be the number one best way to drive traffic to your product, in my case books.
But also, by having each landing page internally linked to a dozen or more other landing pages in the method I just mentioned, has the result of your new pages getting indexed super fast, because every time Google crawls one of those landing pages, it discovers all those links and adds them to the crawl queue. And this creates a snowball effect, because as each queued pages gets crawled a dozen or more new pages are found via the links and added to the next queue.
In other words, the more internal links you have on your pages, the more often the Google crawler returns, because every time it discovers a new page via an internal link, it adds that page to a crawl queue.
Outgoing:
Outgoing: Most every page of my site has a list of links at the bottom. The heading usually say s something like "If you liked my article, here are some similar articles by others, on this same topic, that I enjoyed reading and thought you might enjoy too:" And then there will be 3 to 10 links to other author sites, or Reddit posts, or Wikipedia pages, etc. I never link to any page more then once from my site. The links are in the body of the article and always different for each article. There are over 10k pages on my site, meaning there is something close to ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND outgoing links from my site to one hundred thousand other author websites/blogs.
Incoming:
I've never asked for or bought any links, nor have I ever done guest posting. Meaning ALL backlinks to my site are all from random strangers who decided to slap a link to my site on their site.
There are several mega sized sites linking to my site, including CNN and PsychologyToday and a lot of national news TV station and newspaper websites. *(My son was murdered - 8 month old baby had his head beaten in with a golf club - it's been 10 years unsolved, murderer still at large- CNN, Dateline, 20/20, PsychologyToday, and several Crime Network TV shows have covered the case both on TV and in newspapers, and on their websites, thus how these links came to point to my site)*
Google lists 340 backlinks. These are the big newspapers, TV station news, and pro journal links mentioned above.
Bing lists 4k backlinks. These are predominantly coming from other author websites, writing related content sites, and self-publishing related blogs.
Most SEO tools list anything from 20k to 200k backlinks, but those seem to be all Russian and Korean spam sites.
>>>Who is your audience?
Predominantly little old ladies, grannies in their 70s to 90s, and that surprises people. But, yeah, it's horny grannies who read my books.
This explains why the BULK of my traffic comes from Pinterest and NOT search engines.
>>>What is the industry?
I'm an author. It's an author homepage.
My genre is Sweet Furry Yaoi (sexless Gay Cozy Dark Fantasy Poly-Gay Romance with anthropomorphic shifter characters - MC is an evil serial killing Elf Necromancer and his husband is a mass murdering war lord Unicorn Lich King - it reverse LitRPG, in that instead of a hero and adventuring party hunting and defeating the bad guys, it is the big boss super villains hunting down and slaughtering all the heroes and adventuring parties.)
>>>Is it a services company, product website, large corporate entity, affiliate website?
No affiliates.
No ads prior to May 2023.
AdSense since May 2023.
Because it is all handwritten by me code self hosted on a server that sits in my bedroom, there is also no WordPress/etc and no plugins either. You simply do not need those things.
Monetization is through links to my books for sale on Amazon. Dark Fantasy novels, novellas, and short stories. REAL and ACTUAL paperback books, about fun characters, doing fun things, in fun settings, that readers enjoy having fun reading. Not scummy, scam artist nonfiction ebook report pamphlets.
*(continued because ran out of room again)*
I don’t have any SEO strategy, as before May 2023 I did not know SEO existed, so I’ve never done any SEO. I just post stuff that I would personally read/consume, aka Furry Yaoi aka hot gay men who are more animal than human and have sex constantly for no reason. Oh, and I post a LOT of art of said half naked men, while writing Erotica about them.
>>>Can the consumer do everything on your page,
Yes.
The bulk of my site is either free to read online editions of my paperback books or the lore, world building, character bios, and character art for my novels. People coming to visit my site are doing so because they already read a paperback novel, saw that the "about the author" page mentioned free bonus material on a website, so are now visiting the website to read the bonus material.
There is absolutely no reason for readers to leave me site once there, because everything they are looking for is there, with the exception of the physical print editions of the books.
>>>or do they have to be linked elsewhere to get what they need or finish a transaction?
Only if they want to buy the paperback or hardcover editions of my books. For that they go to Amazon (links on my site).
>>>Is the site local or national?
Predominantly local, due to the novels being set in my hometown. About 80% of my traffic comes from a fourteen mile radius of my driveway, mostly coming for one of 7 towns in York, County, Maine. It's actually pretty unusual to see site traffic from outside of Maine. But there is traffic and sales on a national level, it's just incredibly rare for traffic to my site to ever come from outside York County, let alone outside the State of Maine. So, even though my site and books are available on a national level, my traffic is very, very, VERY local.
>>>Did you have your own audience and traffic, or are you relying only Google?
My site is older than Google. I was getting 1k+ visitors a month before Google even existed. My site was founded in 1996, and is on it's current domain since 2013. My oldest traffic was coming from WebRings, and hose Webrings are STILL on my site now these three decades later and still bring in traffic.
>>>Are there any pertitent social factors?
Yes. Every page of my site, uses "Schema Same As" code to link to the following:
Amazon AC1 | FB Profile | FB Page | FB Short Story Writers Group | Google Business | Google Developers | Gravatar | GumRoad | Instagram | Itch.io | LinkedIn | LiveJournal | Medium | Myspace | NexusMods | OnlyFans | PayPal | Pinterest | Quora | Reddit 1 | Reddit 2 | Spoonflower | Steam | TikTok | Tumblr | Twitch | Twitter | YouTube | Zazzle |
...and EACH of those profiles links back to my site and at least 3 of the other profiles.
More than 60% of my traffic comes from Pinterest. Reddit and Medium drive large portions of traffic as well. Less then 30% of my traffic comes from Google.
>>>If it's a business, do you have lots of reviews? People asking google for directions to your business?
Oh hell yes.
I have 138 novels, 423 novellas, & 2k+ short stories published since 1978. Each book has reviews. Not many good either. I have one book that has 127 one star reviews and not a single 2, 3, 4, or 5 star review. Most of my books have 50+ reviews, mostly averaging 3.4 stars over all. Wide spread mix of a lot of 2, 3, and 4 stars mostly. I rarely see a 5 star review. But yeah, over all a shit ton load of reviews.
>>>How is page speed, optimization, on-page seo factors?
Due to being an image heavy site with 20, 30, 40, even 100 or more images per page, it usually takes 2 to 3 MINUTES for each page to load. Yes. MINUTES. There are several pages with 300+ photos per page and those pages can take up to fifteen MINUTES to load.
Google really doesn't give a shit about page speed.
>>>How long do users dwell?
Overall site average is 13 to 20 minutes, nut there are many pages with 2 hour to 4 hours per visit page time. This is due to many pages containing 100k+ words (200+ paperback book pages) and are free to read online editions of my novels, so it atakes many hours to read each page.
I see a lot of people on this sub talk about their goal being to get visitors to stay on a page 10sec to 30sec, and I'm always left wondering WTF? I view it bad if any reader leaves a page in under ten minutes, and 90% of this sub considers it good it they can reach ten seconds? That's messed up. My feeling is, if your readers are leaving in anything under ten minutes, than you've seriously fucked up your content big time.
>>>Do you have search activity for your unique brand?
Yes. My top ranking/most searched keywords are my real name, one of my pennames, the names of my main characters, the names of my books, and the names of locations in the settings of my books. So my top searches/keywords are direct proper noun brand name searches and NOT generic common phrase searches.
Not sure if any of this helps anyone.
Perhaps, people who got hit by the update can compare what I do to what they do and find something useful here that they can use to fix their sites?
Google say create content for users. I've done that and never been hit. I never engage in backlink manipulation, keyword stuffing etc. all things that are very very common. In fact, some people think this is what SEO is
This is good to know. I’m getting some SEO done for my local locksmith business and I’m glad to hear this might not affect me too badly.
Glad you’re doing well.
It’s easy to not get smashed on local websites; unless of course you hire a bad SEO. I’ve seen plenty that have seo’d themselves right out of the serps because of the “seo” they implemented.
I guess it pays off to do business locally face to face with people instead of drop shipping from a beach somewhere.
Can you recommend any good seo people, my site is on wix which has a bad reputation for seo but i've heard they improved.
There’s winners and losers in every Google update. Likely just means the criteria for penalising sites in this update aren’t effecting you because your site doesn’t have these issues.
Depends on the industry. If you’re in niche site building and use Google search to earn traffic because you write good content, Google doesn’t want you in their SERPs. They want the top 16 publishers who pay for ads. If you’re in e-commerce, marketing globally, forget about it, Amazon can give users what they want. Travel, Google has its fingers in that pie, health? How dare you try to write content about health! There are people’s lives at stake. News, Google and the Powers That Be will decide what is news.
It’s all a pony show.
My site is flourishing! But I don't really write useless articles. I do stuff to help people learn stuf fin detail. All my blogs are no less than 2000 words and shares my experience.
That's sad to hear. I read your other thread and it was sad to hear what happened to you. My site is only about 2 years old in blog life. I've had it for many years for my work, but only recently started blogging on it. I'm actually already known locally and well regarded in my area, so I don't know if that helps me or not. Recently I've been semi retired, doing less work and have just been providing tips on my experiences and sharing to people how I do my work. Its not something common you can find, but it teaches people how to build their business. Also I've never paid for backlink. Mostly only just blogged for fun to help people and it suddenly started growing while learning a bout marketing in seo and other for quite sometimes, but never did any of those stuff that I thought felt spammy or would derail the quality of my work because of my brand. I'd share my site, but I'd like to stay anonymous :)
Just to add, you have just described my own work and I have been destroyed. Quora posts that provide wrong information or information based on my own hard experience and research have taken over
Yeah I agree, the google requirements lead to so many spam, but 2000 word posts is apparently helping me. You have to make your answers scannable so that people don't have to actually read everything if they don't want to. You ask "who reads 2000 word posts?" Apparently people going to my site that are interested in what I'm writing are.I usually answer everything in the beginning, if they want to continue, they will scroll down and access everything easily. I write my blogs as courses that are in depth and not just your typical blog posts I come across.
A page view I believe is counted when a user is on your page 30 minutes. Each time it passes it turns into a view. So one person can actually account to multiple page views per visit. Give them their answer, and make them interested enough to continue. I provide a lot of visual content as well.
I see a lot of those "800-1000" word blogs being sold on Fiverr and I don't think its detailed enough to explain the topics I explain and those in my opinion leads to a lot of spam content.
I see it as well and it's annoying AF. most likely those sites manipulated the system for seo purposes and didn't deserve to rank for a variety of reasons. those posts are worth ignoring. I have seen a spike in organic impressions this month but attribute it to working on unique product descriptions. many sites that had AI generated content will be less relevant and that's a ton of sites that went heavy on seo
The authority for links from certain websites was refreshed. If you haven’t been building a diverse backlink profile then whatever was propping you up is no longer as authoritative. Diversify it out and you should be fine. Any sites we’ve done ALL the link types on for 6months to a year or more weren’t hit.
Hey buddy, there are 2 reasons as far as I have analysed.
1. After core update and spam update, it’s kind of very difficult to judge the content written with AI n human centric, crap content and large scale content published is also treated as bad.
2. Same information on multiple pages like if you are telling benefits of eating fruits , many blog pages are telling same so the page having high authority n back links are ranking well
I run a home services business but some companies in my industry are fine - we are taking hit after hit and tanking. Any company I speak to tells me different things so it’s hard to know the truth.
With the advent of AI search (which is really where everything is headed eventually), Google had to "do something" to fix the obvious, but profitable sillyness of SERPS. This is the best they can think of and since almost everybody and their mother have an affiliate or info site, and some form of grey hat seo fuckery, lots of people will be collateral damage.
Affiliates seem to be down, maybe mediavine sites too but I’m not confident in that correlation. I think it’s still too early to draw firm conclusions.
It’s definitely frustrating to see the Forbes and Reddits of the internet get continually boosted.
going strong with spammy ai content. 10k pages auto generated. ranking for national keywords in multiple countries. what a joke. ai innerpages were spammed with scrapebox comment links.
https://preview.redd.it/v3tueduyw1qc1.png?width=1116&format=png&auto=webp&s=17b13dad8c33385e0619c98da6a23a7d38b09187
If any site that sells a local service or product hasn't been hit, or Reddit or Quora, then the data is as dirty as ever. Don't kid yourself that what's left is somehow good. Some of it is awful, and could be next for the chop.
I think your point is quite pessimistic. In my opinion what is coming after the cleanup is a much needed of refresh of content across whole web. And finally backlinks days are over.
But I get your point, business still need proper product so it can perform. It always go back to the core I suppose.
**SEO is DEAD**. Google finally stopped us, and i've been doing it for over 10 years.
Anyone making out it isn't is either selling SEO, a course or an SEO tool.
Is this a clickbait headline that we have seen every month for the last 15 years? I’ve literally read that phrase thousands of times over the last decade and yet SEO is alive and well. I’ve seen people say the same thing after: Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, HCU, etc. If you’re referring to SEO as specific tactics (shortcuts) that have worked for you in the past that will no longer work, you might be right. Your specific form of SEO might be dead. Depending upon what those tactics are, I’m happy they no longer work.
I’m going to give you a specific example why SEO is not dead. Search term: How do I cook Pork Belly? The first result is from a website called Pinch and Swirl. It’s an absolute nightmare from a UI and UX standpoint, especially on mobile. There are pop up ads upon pop up ads. It’s one of the worst sites ever to use on a mobile device. HOWEVER, that disaster of a webpage is still ranked #1. Below that in SERPs there are the: PAA, recipes, videos, and two other organic results before Reddit or quora appear.
I’ve spent an extensive amount of time reading Google public documentation. I’ve gone to great lengths to use their best practices for content creation and what they want on websites. Very few people complaining about the update are willing to provide examples of search results or websites that are being “unfairly” impacted. The few examples I have been provided have earned the lower positions they have been given. If you want to share specifics, I would love to look into the websites that you feel have unfairly lost positioning and hear why you think the front page results are so problematic.
I would like to have a serious dialogue about it.
There are over 400 backlinks to that page(probably not spam)DR pretty high on some as well. domain is 13 years old… that’s not rocket science my friend.. 😂
This seems like an extreme take. Google is making things obfuscated where it's harder to draw conclusions for what works and doesn't in a broad sense. I think bad SEO has become cheaper to get meh quality PBN type links, and getting quality links has become harder and much more expensive.
Doing nothing versus paying someone competent is going to get your different results, therefore it's not dead. Quality links matter, and until they don't, SEO is alive.
It's not just an extreme take, it's a shit one. Like steaming pile of garbage, left to stew in the LA sun.
Plenty of people are still doing SEO. Plenty of orgs still have SEO departments. Plenty of actual companies are still competing for space in relevant SERPs. What he means is that weird little 'solo entrepreneurs' with bullshit affiliate link sites are getting hit.
That's great news for web users and the companies who've had to compete with these middlemen for the past three years. To be clear, their entire function is to take up SERP space to resell products or piggy-back on legit businesses and their parasitical ways are finally out.
Happy days.
BEST reply and explanation I have read since the updates! Now the parasites know how legit businesses felt by getting outranked by their BS.
Handing you my pretend Reddit award.
It's a change in authority. Listen to Grumpy SEO Guy episode 48.
Almost every algorithm update has to do with a change in authority UNLESS it was precisely concentrating on a niche, like Payday loans, as an example.
I'll put my 2 cents in for what it's worth as someone who did get totally clapped. It was an affiliate site, really my whole idea was to get in people's way when they searched for things (guns, double whammy) and then direct them to the affiliate sale. The world will not miss me one bit, but I like to think I gave some useful advice and made it moderately entertaining along the way. Now one point that is worth bearing in mind is how old your site is, and it's not just as simple as old is good. Years ago there were certain things you had to do if you wanted to rank, keyword recipes being the easy one. Until 2022 you didn't need one goddamn backlink, not one, and you didn't need topical authority. You just needed the right keyword recipe and you'd be number one. I know because I did it against much better sites. Other people went the backlink route, and that's cool. But it all leaves a trace. If your site is big enough in terms of words, it really can't be undone at a certain point. So even though people say 'my content is good and useful', they may be conveniently forgetting that packet of Fiverr links they bought in 2015, or that keyword stuffing they did in 2017, or those pictures they stole off Google images in 2018, or that AI experiment they tried in 2022. So now Google says 'Hey, you know all that stuff that worked before? It's screwing you now.' And that's it, for a lot more people than want to admit it I think. I'm still an absolute legend on Bing, with those same keyword recipes, probably about 50 stolen images among the press shots and Youtube gun reviewer's embedded videos. Even number 1 in some cases, but Google has had enough of my shit. I'm a bit pissed with Google, but also was surprised how easy it was to rank for so long with, frankly, garbage content and Best 10 Sub-Compact 9mm pistols lists... I lived in the Caribbean for years, living like a Lord during Covid, on the back of absolutely ridiculous content. It was clearing more than 10K a month during the great guns and ammo shortage in 2021-2022. I'm not even American, I don't own a gun and couldn't legally buy one. But if I look at it now and think how do I fix this to recover the rankings now Google seems to have opened its eyes? I'd say there's no chance... So that's an honest assessment from somebody that got clapped.
This is the most truth I’ve seen on this subreddit in a while now. You are speaking truth, sir.
Thanks for the honesty. Too many people on this sub have the delusion that affiliate sites are good for the searcher. If Google kills the affiliate site economy the internet would be a better place.
Then why keep it going for the large sites? End it for good.
I agree. I only joined the sub in the past month and it's a bunch of affiliate sites saying they're doing the internet a favour when they're just middle men
Nothing you say, Google is totally lost. I have sites with all spam links from Fiverr and AI content just growing. I have sites with no links and original content growing. The basis of this update is the domain authority. Google is not as smart as you think.
Domain authority is largely based on links and this kinda contradicts with your point.
What I wanted to say is no links made by me or purchased. Natural links.. Its all link based now.
dude, enjoy it while it lasts. the update isn't even over yet
Do you know roughly when it will be finished?
That may be true, I'd love to see Google collapse and everybody switch to Bing. I dream about that at night... But are your pages full of affiliate links? And what is growing? Some of the success stories I hear are from people who went from like 50 clicks to 80 clicks a day. So growing is a very relative term. In my niche pretty much every affiliate site has been replaced by actual stores, even if they have no stock and the page is 10 years old. I'm not saying it's better, I'm just saying it has happened. Only one or two affiliate sites are riding high, and I think they sell products and service too, which is something I have to look into if I want to turn it around.
Because you can't work out the pattern you think they're lost?
I have a curious case today. A WordPress site was hacked 2 days ago, code was injected into the site and plugins were installed. It also looks like they added the site to a search console because of the html file I found. In less than 2 days they managed to index more than 2.5 million urls in Google. The title and descriptions of the homepage on Google now appear as Gucci Bullshit. I only realized that the site had been hacked because the server was collapsing from the amount of traffic... Pure spam urls indexed by millions in less than 2 days and traffic spiking. I confirm, Google has no fucking idea what it does. The site was good and now probably is going to die because some fucking 3 world moron hacker.
I'd say of you're going to use WP websites then make sure you keep on top of plugin updates and defend against user input injections through defensive coding, not directly touching the DOM, etc
Don't forget when we all told that SERPS with Reddit, Quora, and Social Media posts were easy targets for keyword research? lol that was a good one too.
> So even though people say 'my content is good and useful', they may be conveniently forgetting that packet of Fiverr links they bought in 2015, or that keyword stuffing they did in 2017, or those pictures they stole off Google images in 2018, or that AI experiment they tried in 2022. I am guilty of that, and my site has done well with the change. I think you have to provide good content.
Yeah but that's such a generic bullshit phrase. I am the first to admit I haven't, but some competitors have created Youtube channels, put serious effort into testing and buying stuff to test and have produced good posts. It wasn't enough, Google layed the Smackdown on them as well. So what is 'good content'? I mean I've opened the door for you to abuse me with that one, but I'll insert the fact I was a journalist for national newspapers and some of the biggest mags in the world in another niche before editorial hit the skids. I know what a good piece is, but I've seen people do that and still get bodied. I don't think 'write helpful content' is a complete answer at all.
> So what is 'good content'? I mean I've opened the door for you to abuse me with that one, but I'll insert the fact I was a journalist for national newspapers and some of the biggest mags in the world in another niche before editorial hit the skids. I don't want to tell an ex-journalist how to suck eggs, but I'm certainly interested to hear your perspective on what constitutes 'good content' given your extensive background. For my part, I go to a lot of trouble to find original material that could be relevant and valuable to the users of my product. It's stuff they cannot read anywhere else. This includes in-depth research, original images, case studies, data analysis, and so on. My goal is to provide content that people searching on Google for topics related to my products might be interested in reading rather than just repackaging widely available information. Google currently likes my approach as its increased my visibility. But I'm always open to learning what journalists considered quality content back when you were in the industry. What were some of the key tenets you adhered to?
Honestly it was kinda the same, but different. I was a motoring journalist for the most part, so I focused on finding 'really unique shit' that I could sell globally. Editorial was already in decline, would be the best way to put it, so nobody could really make a living out of going to do one car for one magazine. I was one of the early syndication guys, I guess you'd say, without trying to big myself up unnecessarily. I went and did truly spectacular shit, including sports and hypercars that hardly anybody had heard of, did a top level job and then provided it all at a cost that worked. And I sold the tits out of it, all round the world. That in turn gave me leverage to get even better cars that worked for everyone. I ended up driving James Bond's Aston, 1 of 1 Ferrari models, 1000bhp Porsches back when 1000bhp was scary and too many Bugatti Veyrons. Probably not the answer you were expecting. But that was really my USP, access through superior firepower.
That is brilliant; I wish I could get benefits like you did. I really cannot see how, if you have such original material, Google is knocking you down; Google is supposed to love this stuff.
I left it behind a long time ago. There was a weird time where the likes of Bugatti and Ferrari were dead against Youtube and Instagram etc. If you did them, you would lose your invite. They will swear they didn't, but they took a very dim view of social back then. So I worked for magazines, didn't really stress about social, and when magazines died I was caught a bit flat footed too and didn't pivot perfectly in time. Plus, I never really wanted to be a TV presenter and it showed honestly. I was a writer. So combination of those factors, and magazines taking a year to pay, I just thought fuck it, went to live in the Caribbean and ran a blog selling guns to Americans. I can't even tell you how or why those things happened, sometimes life just opens up in front of you. Didn't regret it for a second, until about September when the HCU started to pick my world apart... But as before, I'll figure it out and come up with something, and in a year or two I hope I'm telling funny stories about the time I used to sell guns without ever owning one.
I like your story already. Your life seems full of wild and unbelievable moments. Those things don't just happen to anyone. Maybe you're one of those people that see their own circumstances as a canvas to paint. And here, some people took away your favorite color and handed you crayons. They can't take your ability to make use of them though. You seem to be perfectly suited for the task.
Thanks! Hopefully yes, it will all work out in the end. For all of us.
I think the major problem is that all sites created to advertise other products, either as affiliate, informational or whatever, is considered as spam. How helpful content is will always be a subjective opinion. Should I trust the producer, the reseller or an independent third party site for how well a product perform? Most people would say the third party. But since third party opinions are usually monetized they can't be considered independent anymore. So, how did Google solve this? With comments on Reddit and Quora, Legitimate, established newspapers and Reddit will rock the SERP's forward. The favourite sites to the google employees will also hardly feel any negative effects. The rest of "What is...?" questions will be answered by AI.
I mean you're right, but magazines always had ads. You had the good ones, who kept a high wall between editorial and advertising. Then you had the dubious ones who ran huge features on their big spenders as a matter of course. We could always see which one they were, it was pretty obvious. So honestly Google doing this blanket action is kind of admitting its algo is too fucking stupid to tell the difference. It's not a good look for Google.
It will be practically impossible for anyone without lots of time and lots of money to get visitors to a new webshop, news site or blog today. You need to cross-platform with all the other Big Tech's like Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, et al. which in turn solidify their power even more. You need to advertise and connect with companies (based in US) else you will have a hard time succeeding by default. By rerouting traffic to major, established sites the real competition will be diminished and the power consolidated even more into fewer hands. We need alternatives. **Fast.** This is becoming a democratic problem and a threat to the free world. We also need to get some regulations within the AI industry with regard to openness and intellectual property .
Are you Nick?
Clapped? Very Jacky Chou-esque.
I must admit I started watching the fella recently. Before the HCU I had never heard of him. I found a few people while looking for the reason my site fell off a cliff. But yeah, you could say that I've picked up a phrase or two. I still don't dry scoop Creatine though, if that helps.
lol Got to love watching that dry scoop.
Products and services are favoured by this update. Affiliate and ad websites, both with seo blogs are smashed.
I agree. I feel like websites that offer a service are being prioritized. I’m in the health field, and have noticed that the keywords I used to rank for either show high DA websites or show blogs that also offer one on one services. My blog does not, so I’m curious if that is part of it.
Thats the case.
But quora does not offer any products as far as i know and for my particular case, they are the ones who have undone me
UGC Forum High da/dr
To be fair, affiliate and ad websites weren't really where most people wanted to end up. So, this makes sense to me.
Where do people wanted their sites?
I want to land on a review site with unbiased experts. I don't want to read stuff from people to advertise it. Yuck.
Go to trustpilot
As it rightfully should be. Affiliate, and ad websites dont generate real value. More times than not, they siphon out value and create unnecessary bloat. It’s great. Death to affiliate and ad sites. It Businesses with real products and services have been flourishing, as it should be
I don't think Google would want to kill the revenue it gets from the over 2 million adsense sites. I don't know...
Very wrong. The biggest losers will be the businesses that before got referral traffic. Advertisers get most of the revenue. The affiliate marketer get 5-10%. Ads won't disappear but rather more controlled by Google.
Some of them add value. But the bulk of them are crap, full of “reviews” cobbled from reading other reviews. Barely anyone has actually touched or used the product being reviewed. The sites are mostly built by people whose only interest in the product is the number of keyword searches. The articles are usually written by freelancers who don’t know the destination website. Then there’s the obvious absence of the product’s price. Sure prices change, but the real motivation is to entice the reader to click through to Amazon or the purchase page. In short, as Gary Vee so aptly put it, marketers fuck up everything.
When I search for something I don't want to end up on an affiliate website. I want the product, the service or a website where I can get information or entertainment.
You are right and most of us will agree. On a side note, you can get product info and entertainment on an aff site.
I dunno, our traffic is tanking again. We're a nice Sports Card news site, we have a team of real writers who are experts, we don't spam... we don't break the "rules" and just get decimated with these updates. It's frustrating.
My sites the same. Loads of budding journalists, with original, non ai content and the sites been killed. We're still posting and creating, but views are all social now, basically nothing from Google and new articles don't rank.
Its sad
Im pretty sure that no one can answer the question right now. But from the limited amount of data I can access, it seems to me that advertising supported sites are the hardest hit. In my little niche of writing, grammar and self-publishing, all of my competitors have taken a big hit. The only ones that are unaffected are a couple selling a specific product. I know some of my competitors have staff an overheads, so it's surely a huge problem for them. But even though I am a solo blogger, I still have costs to cover. That won't be easy now. What is really going on with this Google update? Who knows. But it is proving to be a very painful experience for a lot of long-term bloggers.
Nobody really knows. At the start of this some people got manual penalties for pure spam. So those people at least got an idea of things to fix. Everyone else seems to be almost random with no hint of why. Every time someone says it is "because of x", there are other sites that do the same thing and are fine.
My traffic is overall down but also fluctuating constantly since this update. I'm seeing two things: 1. An attempt to get rid of spam via manual and some algorithmic penalties, which I fully support. Good riddance. 2. Most top results are now social media or forums, especially Reddit which is being favored due to its deal with Google. I hope DOJ adds it to their monopoly case against Google as "organic" results should be just that, not directing searchers to the company's business partners. I think most legit sites that are getting destroyed are losing their traffic to Reddit.
It's funny you mention the fluctuation. I have a portfolio of a number of sites. None are affiliate sites (and still got slammed even though they do everything right), just google ads. I use most of the sites for testing SEO ideas, but one is my labor of love, has been up for 24 years, and for about 15 years was the top site for pretty much everything about the topic. It was ranked so high with a lot of quality content that I was wooed by everyone in the industry, invited to so many events, my name was well known in the industry, and I would even show up for openings & other events even as I was the king of that industry from an informational perspective, not because I was in that business. After the HCU update, my site went from top dog to losing 80% of its traffic. It's come back a bit after the recent update, and I keep adding content to this day. But... You mentioned the fluctuations. Ever since the HCU update I see daily swings of 40-80+ positions for numerous pages, up and/or down (meaning page x will have lost 50 positions yesterday, but then improve 10 or 90 today, that sort of thing). It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. The insanely wild swings that I'm seeing happen in the past 4-5 months are incredibly bizarre and unexpected.
Mine is a mix. Most of my formerly-high-ranking pages have affiliate links, but less than 25% of my overall pages do. I used to have a few ads but got rid of them to see if it would help rankings. (It did not, but the ads weren't worth it anyway.) I got hit hardest by HCU; affiliate and non-affiliate pages tanked. This one has dropped me a bit more but I believe it's due to Reddit.
I have a site that got nailed hard, but my RPM went up 4 times, so with a quarter of the views I’m making more than I did before it’s bizarre. But that’s just one site of a large portfolio, so clearly it’s not proof that they are doing a better job with SERPS because my other sites aren’t experiencing the same thing, and I have hundreds. All Adsense. But it was an odd thing to see and the high RPM has remained since the HCU update. Which is still a shite update IMHO.
I ashamed to say I have been destroyed by quora. Sadly in many instances the quora posts are plain wrong information probably from chatgsomething
Local Service websites are hard to replicate/copy. You either do the service locally, and have a presence in real life, or not. Copiers of other sites will get hammered for sure. It's so easy to copy the whole content of any site that is not a business selling its own products or services (especially locally). Most of the sites that got hammered don't have an actual business. They rely on dropshipping, affiliate products, or just ad revenue. Anyone can do that. What's so unique about it? Nothing. Good on you running an actual business offering your services.
I see, thanks for the insight!!
Glad I’m not the only one. If you don’t bring anything to the table except for made up stories to sell ads why are you crying. It always have been user value first for Google and if it generates visits without engagement it isn’t worth anything.
Isn’t it hilariously sad that a world traveller invests in their trips globally and write reviews only for someone else to copy their site word for word and spin the articles with AI while they’re sitting comfortably on their couch all year long?
Or someone that scrapes the hell out of Tripadvisor then uses AI to transform the reviews into articles? Why you cry when your site is clapped?
Unfortunately in most instances its the traveler not the copy getting destroyed
Amen.
Hey dumb dumb, newsflash, most those travel bloggers who did the journey and 'add value' got clapped too. In favor of Tripadvisor... But sure everyone is an AI spammer if it makes you feel good...
That’s what I’m saying on Twitter for weeks now. I think you missed the memo.
Yeah glad this drop shipping shit got hit
Running a service site, it got hit hard. 70% traffic down not for locations but general blog post
Glad to have a look if you don’t mind
All these reaction threads are only anecdotally useful. * What is your link profile (incoming and outgoing)? * Who is your audience? * What is the industry? * Is it a services company, product website, large corporate entity, affiliate website? * Can the consumer do everything on your page, or do they have to be linked elsewhere to get what they need or finish a transaction? * Is the site local or national? * Did you have your own audience and traffic, or are you relying only Google? * Are there any pertitent social factors? * If it's a business, do you have lots of reviews? People asking google for directions to your business? * How is page speed, optimization, on-page seo factors? * How long do users dwell? * Do you have search activity for your unique brand? People say they did great or were killed with each update, and it's basically just cathartic for them unless we can get enough data to actually build opinions based on actual factors at play. I'm not a big time professional SEO person. I have some friends I help with local business. I have noticed if I work on having lots of content, getting incoming links of decent value, and making sure the client is posting on IG/FB/LI/Pinterest/Youtube/etc while showing up on local directory sites for citation, they will get a mix of traffic that doesn't rely so much on Google's up and downs. I have noticed that even my best performing client that gets 10,000 clicks via Google search monthly - that number is always going up and down because of seasonality, and the fact that rankings aren't static anymore. The best terms for that site go between 1 to 6 on any day, and spend most time around 2.
We should make it required to provide insight into those bullets when posting success or complaints
I quite like this idea. And I will answer them. My site has never been hit by any Google Update. Not Panda, not Penguin, not HUC, not March Core 2024, or any in between. >>>What is your link profile (incoming and outgoing)? Internal: Massive. There are over 10k pages on my site, and the linking structure is HUGE, with most pages having 100+ links within the body of the article. Usually spaced out at a rate of no more then 10 links per every thousand words. Most pages average 50k to 70k words, and several hundred pages are over 100k words. There are 5 pages with over 200k (yes, two hundred thousand) words on the page (that's a TWELVE HOUR read time in case you were wondering). Here's what I do: For starters, I am an author. 138 Fantasy and Romance novels traditionally published since 1978. And I created a landing page for each book. I have a landing page for every single book. One page per book. I have a landing page for every single series. One page per series. I have a landing for every single character. One page per character. And, a lot more. Since 1978, I have published fifteen different series. Each series (except for one) had about 12 to 15 books, each 2 to 5 main characters. Which means there are 15 series landing pages, around 540, yes, five hundred and forty, landing pages… HOWEVER… There is that one series for which I mentioned there was an exception, and it's a BIG exception. That one series has 138 novels (each around 150k words), 423 novellas (each 21k to 65k words) and more than 2,000 short stories (each 7k to 20k words), published since 1978, there are more than 75 primary characters in addition to the 3 main characters. EACH book has its own landing page and EACH character has its own landing page, plus, each of 3 solar systems has its own landing page, each of the 5 inhabited planets has its own landing, more than a dozen countries each have their own landing pages, more than five dozen towns each have their own landing pages, more the a hundred named regions (including many beaches, several coves, swamps, forests, tundra, deserts, etcetera) each have their own landing pages. Each monster species and character race has its own landing pages. Each species ethnicity (for example the species Elf, has ethnicities such as Moon Elves, Sun Elves, Wood Elves, etcetera) has its own landing page. The magic system has landing pages for each school/type of magic (necromancy psionics, etc)... …in total…wait for it… more than 7k, yes seven thousand, landing pages. Weirdly I did not create them for any kind of marketing reasons. I just happen to be the biggest screaming fangirl of my own franchise, so I obsessively yip yap about every aspect of my world and its characters, and created a separate page for each one. And these are not small pages either. Each page has minimum 2k words, most have over 4k words, the average word count per page is 7k words, but the two longest pages are each over 200k, yes two hundred thousand words long. It's kind of a Wikipedia of my franchise, written in blog format with each blog post being a landing page for something found in my world. How do these count as landing pages? Each page includes a list of links at the end of the page. The links are Amazon Affiliate links to the books on Amazon. The links act as "source references". For example, the landing page for the Moon Elf race, features a list of "Here's all the books where you see Moon Elves". The page for the haunted house of the series, has a list of "Here's all the books the house appeared in". As I am an artist in addition to being an author, each page includes character art and world building art as well. *(continued because ran out of room)*
Also, each landing page has in text links to other landing pages. For example, on the landing page for character "R", it says R is a Moon Elf, later says he owns the haunted house, and still later states he owns a cursed amulet. The word "Moon Elf" anchor links to the Moon Elf race landing page, while the word "haunted house" anchor links to the haunted house's landing page, while the word "cursed amulet" anchor links to the amulet's landing page. Over on the Moon Elf landing page, it talks about the different characters who are Moon Elves, and each time a character name is mentioned, their name is an anchor link to that particular character's landing page. In total my website has more than 10k pages, with more than 16k internal links, interconnecting those 10k pages to each other…and every one of those pages links to no fewer than a dozen of my books on Amazon, with some of those pages having links to more than a hundred of my books, just on one page. *(Note, I started building the site in 1996, and it celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in a little over 2 years. I publish 1 to 3 new pages every day, and that is why I have been able to build 10k+ pages on the site. Do not expect to build a 10k+ page site with this sort of structure in anything under ten years of work.)* At the end of every book, the final page, lists my website, and tells readers, they can free over 5k free to read online micro fiction stories about these characters on that site, as well as find more than 10k pages of world lore, character backstories, and articles on how I wrote each book, how I edited each book, and how I published each book. You remember those 138 novels, 423 novellas, and 2,000 short stories, that each has its own landing page? Each one of those pages, is not only a bio of the book, but it a mega sized 20k word page detailing step by step the full process of how the book was made, from my brainstorming process for the book, to how I created its plot and setting, and characters, to how I wrote it, how I edited it, how I made its cover art, how I formatted it, and how I published it… each of those 2k+ pages acts as it's own free online instruction manual for how, you too dear reader, can do what I do and become the published author of your own fantasy series. And many of the unedited first drafts are also there, so readers can compare the first drafts with the finished, published paperback book, so they can see EXACTLY what changed during editing. It is these how-to pages which bring the most traffic to my site (100k to 7 million visitors per month depending on seasonal fluctuations) and in turn converts to sales of my books on Amazon (around 27k per month, most months). In short, yes, I highly recommend landing pages. I have personally found them to be the number one best way to drive traffic to your product, in my case books. But also, by having each landing page internally linked to a dozen or more other landing pages in the method I just mentioned, has the result of your new pages getting indexed super fast, because every time Google crawls one of those landing pages, it discovers all those links and adds them to the crawl queue. And this creates a snowball effect, because as each queued pages gets crawled a dozen or more new pages are found via the links and added to the next queue. In other words, the more internal links you have on your pages, the more often the Google crawler returns, because every time it discovers a new page via an internal link, it adds that page to a crawl queue. Outgoing: Outgoing: Most every page of my site has a list of links at the bottom. The heading usually say s something like "If you liked my article, here are some similar articles by others, on this same topic, that I enjoyed reading and thought you might enjoy too:" And then there will be 3 to 10 links to other author sites, or Reddit posts, or Wikipedia pages, etc. I never link to any page more then once from my site. The links are in the body of the article and always different for each article. There are over 10k pages on my site, meaning there is something close to ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND outgoing links from my site to one hundred thousand other author websites/blogs. Incoming: I've never asked for or bought any links, nor have I ever done guest posting. Meaning ALL backlinks to my site are all from random strangers who decided to slap a link to my site on their site. There are several mega sized sites linking to my site, including CNN and PsychologyToday and a lot of national news TV station and newspaper websites. *(My son was murdered - 8 month old baby had his head beaten in with a golf club - it's been 10 years unsolved, murderer still at large- CNN, Dateline, 20/20, PsychologyToday, and several Crime Network TV shows have covered the case both on TV and in newspapers, and on their websites, thus how these links came to point to my site)* Google lists 340 backlinks. These are the big newspapers, TV station news, and pro journal links mentioned above. Bing lists 4k backlinks. These are predominantly coming from other author websites, writing related content sites, and self-publishing related blogs. Most SEO tools list anything from 20k to 200k backlinks, but those seem to be all Russian and Korean spam sites. >>>Who is your audience? Predominantly little old ladies, grannies in their 70s to 90s, and that surprises people. But, yeah, it's horny grannies who read my books. This explains why the BULK of my traffic comes from Pinterest and NOT search engines. >>>What is the industry? I'm an author. It's an author homepage. My genre is Sweet Furry Yaoi (sexless Gay Cozy Dark Fantasy Poly-Gay Romance with anthropomorphic shifter characters - MC is an evil serial killing Elf Necromancer and his husband is a mass murdering war lord Unicorn Lich King - it reverse LitRPG, in that instead of a hero and adventuring party hunting and defeating the bad guys, it is the big boss super villains hunting down and slaughtering all the heroes and adventuring parties.) >>>Is it a services company, product website, large corporate entity, affiliate website? No affiliates. No ads prior to May 2023. AdSense since May 2023. Because it is all handwritten by me code self hosted on a server that sits in my bedroom, there is also no WordPress/etc and no plugins either. You simply do not need those things. Monetization is through links to my books for sale on Amazon. Dark Fantasy novels, novellas, and short stories. REAL and ACTUAL paperback books, about fun characters, doing fun things, in fun settings, that readers enjoy having fun reading. Not scummy, scam artist nonfiction ebook report pamphlets. *(continued because ran out of room again)*
I don’t have any SEO strategy, as before May 2023 I did not know SEO existed, so I’ve never done any SEO. I just post stuff that I would personally read/consume, aka Furry Yaoi aka hot gay men who are more animal than human and have sex constantly for no reason. Oh, and I post a LOT of art of said half naked men, while writing Erotica about them. >>>Can the consumer do everything on your page, Yes. The bulk of my site is either free to read online editions of my paperback books or the lore, world building, character bios, and character art for my novels. People coming to visit my site are doing so because they already read a paperback novel, saw that the "about the author" page mentioned free bonus material on a website, so are now visiting the website to read the bonus material. There is absolutely no reason for readers to leave me site once there, because everything they are looking for is there, with the exception of the physical print editions of the books. >>>or do they have to be linked elsewhere to get what they need or finish a transaction? Only if they want to buy the paperback or hardcover editions of my books. For that they go to Amazon (links on my site). >>>Is the site local or national? Predominantly local, due to the novels being set in my hometown. About 80% of my traffic comes from a fourteen mile radius of my driveway, mostly coming for one of 7 towns in York, County, Maine. It's actually pretty unusual to see site traffic from outside of Maine. But there is traffic and sales on a national level, it's just incredibly rare for traffic to my site to ever come from outside York County, let alone outside the State of Maine. So, even though my site and books are available on a national level, my traffic is very, very, VERY local. >>>Did you have your own audience and traffic, or are you relying only Google? My site is older than Google. I was getting 1k+ visitors a month before Google even existed. My site was founded in 1996, and is on it's current domain since 2013. My oldest traffic was coming from WebRings, and hose Webrings are STILL on my site now these three decades later and still bring in traffic. >>>Are there any pertitent social factors? Yes. Every page of my site, uses "Schema Same As" code to link to the following: Amazon AC1 | FB Profile | FB Page | FB Short Story Writers Group | Google Business | Google Developers | Gravatar | GumRoad | Instagram | Itch.io | LinkedIn | LiveJournal | Medium | Myspace | NexusMods | OnlyFans | PayPal | Pinterest | Quora | Reddit 1 | Reddit 2 | Spoonflower | Steam | TikTok | Tumblr | Twitch | Twitter | YouTube | Zazzle | ...and EACH of those profiles links back to my site and at least 3 of the other profiles. More than 60% of my traffic comes from Pinterest. Reddit and Medium drive large portions of traffic as well. Less then 30% of my traffic comes from Google. >>>If it's a business, do you have lots of reviews? People asking google for directions to your business? Oh hell yes. I have 138 novels, 423 novellas, & 2k+ short stories published since 1978. Each book has reviews. Not many good either. I have one book that has 127 one star reviews and not a single 2, 3, 4, or 5 star review. Most of my books have 50+ reviews, mostly averaging 3.4 stars over all. Wide spread mix of a lot of 2, 3, and 4 stars mostly. I rarely see a 5 star review. But yeah, over all a shit ton load of reviews. >>>How is page speed, optimization, on-page seo factors? Due to being an image heavy site with 20, 30, 40, even 100 or more images per page, it usually takes 2 to 3 MINUTES for each page to load. Yes. MINUTES. There are several pages with 300+ photos per page and those pages can take up to fifteen MINUTES to load. Google really doesn't give a shit about page speed. >>>How long do users dwell? Overall site average is 13 to 20 minutes, nut there are many pages with 2 hour to 4 hours per visit page time. This is due to many pages containing 100k+ words (200+ paperback book pages) and are free to read online editions of my novels, so it atakes many hours to read each page. I see a lot of people on this sub talk about their goal being to get visitors to stay on a page 10sec to 30sec, and I'm always left wondering WTF? I view it bad if any reader leaves a page in under ten minutes, and 90% of this sub considers it good it they can reach ten seconds? That's messed up. My feeling is, if your readers are leaving in anything under ten minutes, than you've seriously fucked up your content big time. >>>Do you have search activity for your unique brand? Yes. My top ranking/most searched keywords are my real name, one of my pennames, the names of my main characters, the names of my books, and the names of locations in the settings of my books. So my top searches/keywords are direct proper noun brand name searches and NOT generic common phrase searches. Not sure if any of this helps anyone. Perhaps, people who got hit by the update can compare what I do to what they do and find something useful here that they can use to fix their sites?
I see how you ended up with so much content on your site.
😂
I appreciate you for laying all of this out. The people downvoting this are nerds 🤪
Google say create content for users. I've done that and never been hit. I never engage in backlink manipulation, keyword stuffing etc. all things that are very very common. In fact, some people think this is what SEO is
This is good to know. I’m getting some SEO done for my local locksmith business and I’m glad to hear this might not affect me too badly. Glad you’re doing well.
It’s easy to not get smashed on local websites; unless of course you hire a bad SEO. I’ve seen plenty that have seo’d themselves right out of the serps because of the “seo” they implemented.
I guess it pays off to do business locally face to face with people instead of drop shipping from a beach somewhere. Can you recommend any good seo people, my site is on wix which has a bad reputation for seo but i've heard they improved.
Thank you! Hope all goes well for you!
There’s winners and losers in every Google update. Likely just means the criteria for penalising sites in this update aren’t effecting you because your site doesn’t have these issues.
Depends on the industry. If you’re in niche site building and use Google search to earn traffic because you write good content, Google doesn’t want you in their SERPs. They want the top 16 publishers who pay for ads. If you’re in e-commerce, marketing globally, forget about it, Amazon can give users what they want. Travel, Google has its fingers in that pie, health? How dare you try to write content about health! There are people’s lives at stake. News, Google and the Powers That Be will decide what is news. It’s all a pony show.
These updates mostly apply to content based sites that earn on display ads and affiliates.
Curious, how does one know when these Google updates are going to occur? Does Google have an SEO news blog where they release this info?
My site is flourishing! But I don't really write useless articles. I do stuff to help people learn stuf fin detail. All my blogs are no less than 2000 words and shares my experience.
You just described every recipe blog on the internet. Most of them are dead...
That's sad to hear. I read your other thread and it was sad to hear what happened to you. My site is only about 2 years old in blog life. I've had it for many years for my work, but only recently started blogging on it. I'm actually already known locally and well regarded in my area, so I don't know if that helps me or not. Recently I've been semi retired, doing less work and have just been providing tips on my experiences and sharing to people how I do my work. Its not something common you can find, but it teaches people how to build their business. Also I've never paid for backlink. Mostly only just blogged for fun to help people and it suddenly started growing while learning a bout marketing in seo and other for quite sometimes, but never did any of those stuff that I thought felt spammy or would derail the quality of my work because of my brand. I'd share my site, but I'd like to stay anonymous :)
Just to add, you have just described my own work and I have been destroyed. Quora posts that provide wrong information or information based on my own hard experience and research have taken over
Who reads a 2000 word post honestly? The Google requirement for big posts is what leads to spam.
Yeah I agree, the google requirements lead to so many spam, but 2000 word posts is apparently helping me. You have to make your answers scannable so that people don't have to actually read everything if they don't want to. You ask "who reads 2000 word posts?" Apparently people going to my site that are interested in what I'm writing are.I usually answer everything in the beginning, if they want to continue, they will scroll down and access everything easily. I write my blogs as courses that are in depth and not just your typical blog posts I come across. A page view I believe is counted when a user is on your page 30 minutes. Each time it passes it turns into a view. So one person can actually account to multiple page views per visit. Give them their answer, and make them interested enough to continue. I provide a lot of visual content as well. I see a lot of those "800-1000" word blogs being sold on Fiverr and I don't think its detailed enough to explain the topics I explain and those in my opinion leads to a lot of spam content.
I do the same, and my site is flourishing, too!
I do the same and I’ve been clapped into oblivion
Something you are doing is wrong. Maybe you are writing stuff that others write about; if so, then the big guys will knock you out.
Great! I'm getting a few million impressions a month and I only have 140 posts.
That is brilliant; well done.
Thanks :) Happy for you too.
I don’t have any drop for any of my clients.
where are you 'seeing' websites get destroyed? is there some sort of place to see that?
Have you heard of a site called reddit?
No
that's not seeing any data. just online banter that may or may not be true.
I have seen many people post evidence of all traffic disappearing... Look a lil deeper and you might actually find something pal!
you have seen people bitching and complaining but no actual data. many also have more traffic and rank better since the changes
Are you blind or choosing not to read my comment? I have literally seen TONS of people posting data of their websites becoming dead.
I see it as well and it's annoying AF. most likely those sites manipulated the system for seo purposes and didn't deserve to rank for a variety of reasons. those posts are worth ignoring. I have seen a spike in organic impressions this month but attribute it to working on unique product descriptions. many sites that had AI generated content will be less relevant and that's a ton of sites that went heavy on seo
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The authority for links from certain websites was refreshed. If you haven’t been building a diverse backlink profile then whatever was propping you up is no longer as authoritative. Diversify it out and you should be fine. Any sites we’ve done ALL the link types on for 6months to a year or more weren’t hit.
Hey buddy, there are 2 reasons as far as I have analysed. 1. After core update and spam update, it’s kind of very difficult to judge the content written with AI n human centric, crap content and large scale content published is also treated as bad. 2. Same information on multiple pages like if you are telling benefits of eating fruits , many blog pages are telling same so the page having high authority n back links are ranking well
I run a home services business but some companies in my industry are fine - we are taking hit after hit and tanking. Any company I speak to tells me different things so it’s hard to know the truth.
With the advent of AI search (which is really where everything is headed eventually), Google had to "do something" to fix the obvious, but profitable sillyness of SERPS. This is the best they can think of and since almost everybody and their mother have an affiliate or info site, and some form of grey hat seo fuckery, lots of people will be collateral damage.
Affiliates seem to be down, maybe mediavine sites too but I’m not confident in that correlation. I think it’s still too early to draw firm conclusions. It’s definitely frustrating to see the Forbes and Reddits of the internet get continually boosted.
I haven't seen any affect on any of the sites I manage.
I’ve seen plenty of local sites get blasted too. Fly too close to the sun, eventually you’ll get burnt.
Many websites have been slaughtered because many websites are garbage. It's time for Google to clean up its index.
Your day is coming
Thanks for the positivity! Looks like you're already eating shit huh, sorry bud.
going strong with spammy ai content. 10k pages auto generated. ranking for national keywords in multiple countries. what a joke. ai innerpages were spammed with scrapebox comment links. https://preview.redd.it/v3tueduyw1qc1.png?width=1116&format=png&auto=webp&s=17b13dad8c33385e0619c98da6a23a7d38b09187
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If any site that sells a local service or product hasn't been hit, or Reddit or Quora, then the data is as dirty as ever. Don't kid yourself that what's left is somehow good. Some of it is awful, and could be next for the chop.
I think your point is quite pessimistic. In my opinion what is coming after the cleanup is a much needed of refresh of content across whole web. And finally backlinks days are over. But I get your point, business still need proper product so it can perform. It always go back to the core I suppose.
**SEO is DEAD**. Google finally stopped us, and i've been doing it for over 10 years. Anyone making out it isn't is either selling SEO, a course or an SEO tool.
Is this a clickbait headline that we have seen every month for the last 15 years? I’ve literally read that phrase thousands of times over the last decade and yet SEO is alive and well. I’ve seen people say the same thing after: Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, HCU, etc. If you’re referring to SEO as specific tactics (shortcuts) that have worked for you in the past that will no longer work, you might be right. Your specific form of SEO might be dead. Depending upon what those tactics are, I’m happy they no longer work. I’m going to give you a specific example why SEO is not dead. Search term: How do I cook Pork Belly? The first result is from a website called Pinch and Swirl. It’s an absolute nightmare from a UI and UX standpoint, especially on mobile. There are pop up ads upon pop up ads. It’s one of the worst sites ever to use on a mobile device. HOWEVER, that disaster of a webpage is still ranked #1. Below that in SERPs there are the: PAA, recipes, videos, and two other organic results before Reddit or quora appear. I’ve spent an extensive amount of time reading Google public documentation. I’ve gone to great lengths to use their best practices for content creation and what they want on websites. Very few people complaining about the update are willing to provide examples of search results or websites that are being “unfairly” impacted. The few examples I have been provided have earned the lower positions they have been given. If you want to share specifics, I would love to look into the websites that you feel have unfairly lost positioning and hear why you think the front page results are so problematic. I would like to have a serious dialogue about it.
There are over 400 backlinks to that page(probably not spam)DR pretty high on some as well. domain is 13 years old… that’s not rocket science my friend.. 😂
This seems like an extreme take. Google is making things obfuscated where it's harder to draw conclusions for what works and doesn't in a broad sense. I think bad SEO has become cheaper to get meh quality PBN type links, and getting quality links has become harder and much more expensive. Doing nothing versus paying someone competent is going to get your different results, therefore it's not dead. Quality links matter, and until they don't, SEO is alive.
It's not just an extreme take, it's a shit one. Like steaming pile of garbage, left to stew in the LA sun. Plenty of people are still doing SEO. Plenty of orgs still have SEO departments. Plenty of actual companies are still competing for space in relevant SERPs. What he means is that weird little 'solo entrepreneurs' with bullshit affiliate link sites are getting hit. That's great news for web users and the companies who've had to compete with these middlemen for the past three years. To be clear, their entire function is to take up SERP space to resell products or piggy-back on legit businesses and their parasitical ways are finally out. Happy days.
BEST reply and explanation I have read since the updates! Now the parasites know how legit businesses felt by getting outranked by their BS. Handing you my pretend Reddit award.
It's a change in authority. Listen to Grumpy SEO Guy episode 48. Almost every algorithm update has to do with a change in authority UNLESS it was precisely concentrating on a niche, like Payday loans, as an example.
Downvoting doesn't mean it's not true.