Back in September,
One of my sites got over 35,000 pageviews in a day
And was making over $500 per day from ads.
I was ecstatic!
Fast forward a few months…
The site is now getting around half the traffic of Jan 2022,
Some days it makes just $30 in ads.
That’s quite the drop!
So,
How did it go from $500+ days to under $50 days?
How did my site getting beasted by Google affect me mentally?
And, what am I doing about it?
Let’s dive in…
1. What the hell happened?
Honestly, I’d put off looking at it until now.
The traffic is always spiky with this site.
It’s incredibly seasonal.
Often, something happens in the news and for a few days or weeks people Google things.
That’s out of my control
But it does make it harder to analyse the data.
When I eventually dug into it,
I could see that the site had been hit by multiple Google updates.
Starting with the spam update in October
And then
With either the helpful content update or the link spam update,
Which both rolled out at the same time in Dec/Jan
(Thanks, Google!)
One interesting thing that happened though…
(Thanks to @IntrovertGeekUK for spotting this for me)
Was that the site lost ALL of it’s featured snippets.
The snippets still exist on Google’s results pages,
But I’m not allowed to win them any more.
I used to win 12-15% of the available snippets.
Now, I win zero.
(According to ahrefs data)
Google denies that a ‘snippet ban’ exists.
But it obviously does.
Even if they don’t call it that.
Some sites just can’t win snippets.
Which makes sense, right?
I mean,
You wouldn’t want your grandma to be able to win the snippet for
“Can you give whiskey to babies to help them sleep?”
I would note though,
That losing the snippets was only the start of the problem.
It was December when the traffic really started to decline.
Not that I noticed,
I took pretty much all of December off to go travelling around Europe.
2. How did this affect me?
Luckily for me, this isn’t my main site.
It represents less than 10% of my income.
So if it dropped to zero, I would be fine.
I’m so grateful for that.
I’ve had the site for 2 years and it’s already paid out 10X my investment.
So at this point, I can’t lose.
I had no plans to ever sell the site.
If I did,
I might have felt sad that its value would now be a fraction of what it was.
But there’s no point thinking like that.
That would be a shortcut to depression.
This has reinforced to me though,
That in this game,
Multiple streams of income are essential.
Now,
That could be having multiples websites.
Or, it could be having multiple channels (YouTube, email, social)
It could be having a day job
Or it could be having freelancing skills
Ideally, having two or three of those is best.
Because, as this case study shows,
Putting all your eggs in one basket
Is dangerous AF.
3. What am I doing now?
My very fortunate position of having four websites
Means that I can choose to focus on those instead.
Sure, it would be fun to fix this one up,
It would be nice to say to everyone:
‘LOOK HOW I FIXED THIS SITE AND IT RECOVERED’
But I don’t have to.
And honestly,
I don’t want to.
Why not?
Well, for one, you can never be sure exactly what to work on.
I do think that most updates do what they’re designed to,
In that they make Google better at its job.
So, you could say that the traffic for this site is now where it should be.
Perhaps it was just inflated before?
And if the update wasn’t right, and the site didn’t deserve to be demoted..?
Well, then Google could put it back!
Even if I do nothing.
Graphs like this happen…
The organic traffic rollercoaster isn’t for everyone. 🟢 2000 PVs/day ➡️ 500 PVs/day 🟢 $100/day ➡️ $15/day Weathering the storm and patiently waiting for the pop. ✌️ pic.twitter.com/RhqJtUYfiF — Keith (Niche Twins) 👨💻 (@patientpublish) November 16, 2022
That doesn’t mean every time you get hit by an update you should change everything.
You could be doing more harm than good.
So, I’m going to leave this to sit for a while.
I’ll probably work on updating and improving the content eventually.
But for now,
I’m remaining grateful that I have bigger fish to fry.
Until next time
NSL
P.S.
If you fancy meeting me in person for a beer and a chat, there may still be a few tickets left.