Hi!
As you’ll know, Google started rolling out its latest update on Thursday 15th August.
And since then, many of us have been like this…
Refreshing GSC right now is basically like checking if you have a huge payrise or you’ve been fired – and there’s a fairly high chance of either.
No wonder it’s addictive!
You know I’m a chronic oversharer, so let’s see how my sites are doing…
Most of the small ones are as dead as ever.
And on the day of the update, Google gave one of them a manual penalty for unnatural links.
Cheers, pal.
They gave me an example of a bad link.
It was a roundup post where a blogger had listed the ‘Best Places To Visit in X’.
I had submitted a photo and a couple of paragraphs about why I love it, and they linked to my homepage.
Brands and bloggers reach out to me fairly often for content like this.
It’s an easy way for them to write a post with input from experts.
Should I be insisting that links like these are nofollow in the future?
Who knows.
So yeah, no change to any of my small sites (even the one with the penalty).
That’s to be expected, as I stopped working on them a long time ago.
But my main site?
Well, I have put a lot of effort into ‘fixing that up’.
And here’s what the graph is looking like…
I’m pretty thrilled that the line is looking almost vertical.
I have no idea how long it will continue to rise for… but it’s a good sign for sure.
It could continue like that for weeks, or it could come straight back down.
All I can do is wait.
However, I am conscious that when you see a 90% drop, and then a 90% rise, you still only have 19% of your original traffic.
When I zoom out to 16 months, I can see how much more recovery is needed to get back to where we were…
It’s far too early to call this a success story,
But I don’t mind sharing the steps I’ve taken over the past 6 months to improve the site.
Here’s what I did…
1 – I deleted about 100 posts.
Anything written to answer a specific question that no longer ranked got the chop.
I also had some posts that were a little outside the niche – those went too.
And I removed any ‘brand-swapping’ style posts (there were almost identical with just the minor differences between them).
2 – We improved 150 posts.
I ordered the posts by the biggest traffic losses (some had lost 10k clicks per month!)
These were thoroughly updated, improved, and many of them were de-optimised to perform well on Facebook and email rather than search.
My past emails detail exactly what was done with these.
3 – We created hundreds of new no-SEO posts.
These don’t target keywords, but instead, cover the topics that people want to click on from Facebook and email.
They have no SEO optimisation whatsoever.
People don’t search for these, but they stumble across them and love them.
4 – We created hundreds of news articles.
These are super quick and easy to create with this tool that uses AI to write up the latest news.
These have made as much as $800 each from display ads, so whether having news on your site helps with SEO or not (I’ve no idea), they’re still worth doing.
You can noindex them if you want, but I don’t because the content is good.
There were two main aims of this strategy:
A – Grow revenue from Facebook and email (it worked, those overtook search)
B – Regain search traffic by avoiding making “content primarily made to attract visits from search engines.”
Yep, it’s a paradox, but that’s a line straight from the number 1 key practice recommendation in the Google guidelines.
Google’s number 2 recommendation is ‘use words’ and number 3 is ‘make your internal links crawlable’.
These are pretty obvious and essential things.
But, point number 4 is very interesting to me.
It says:
- “Tell people about your site. Be active in communities where you can tell like-minded people about your services and products that you mention on your site.”
To me, that sounds like brand building.
Those ‘communities’ could be your Facebook page, email list and YouTube channel.
My top traffic keyword is my brand name.
When I meet people who recognise me from the blog and social media, they often say things like: “I started following you because my sister told me how useful your website is.”
So I know I have a brand. And I’ve worked hard for that.
My hope is that Google is moving more towards using brand signals.
To me, it seems like the most sensible way to tell the difference between real, human bloggers and content-generating robots.
But we’ll see.
Whatever happens with Google, I’m still all-in on Facebook and email, with YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest ticking along in the background in case I need another pivot.
– NSL
P.S. I’ve been sending this email every week for since May 2022. You can access every past issue for free here.
P.P.S. If you need any recommendations for anything, everything I use myself is here.