I Need Advice - Can Anyone Help?
Hi WA family,
We are all aware of health sites been penalized by Google and that is nearly impossible to rank if you are not an expert or authority but even authorities who are for so many years in that field are penalized.I have a health-related website who is 21 months old and I am of course affected. I still rank for some terms but I am on 10-20 visitors per day which is crazy.
I am in doubt what to do, should I sell my website, should I continue to work on it? Should I start everything from scratch?
I really don't know which direction to choose. If I give up on this site that means all I did was in vain for 20 months, I know that big authorities also lost their money and business but still.
If I start from scratch that means months and months of the same hard work for Google to recognize me, to rank me, etc.
I think that most easy decision is to give up but I don't want to do that.
Can anyone advice me what is the best decision to make in this case?
Thank you all in advance.
Dani
Recent Comments
10
Hi,
Same thing happened to me. I decided to continue and now I'm getting more traffic from Bing and Yahoo than from Google.
I make less money than last year, but I also put less effort into it, so it's more passive income.
I also noticed I started getting more direct traffic and traffic from other sources like duckduckgo and others.
I'm going to write more for the site and hope it improves.
So, I think that to continue was a good idea. Google is not everything. And who knows what happens next year?
Cheers
Thank you for your comment, I will definitely keep doing, just like you said, everything happens fast today so there could be improvements.
Hi
My advice is to run some Google ads or some bing ads to increase your visitors to your site.
Or just join Pinterest and build up the traffic there.
I have with Pinterest 4000 people each day on my site.
Yes, ranking is affected but google is not the only search engine use duck duck, Bing, Baidu, Firefox etc.
Cheers Sylvia
I wonder what you mean by "use duck duck, Bing, Baidu, Firefox etc. ". Those are search engines, you cannot do much or use them, it is up to them to rank you, and those are minor players in any case.
Your numbers with Pinterest are impressive.
Hi
Yes, those are search engines and you can index your site with duck duck. Although the % is low most people who have money are on duck duck as they want mainly there privacy protected.
You can advertise with duck duck on bing and I have good results with it.
Pinterest, for example, is also a search engine and brings traffic to my site. Twitter is also a search engine brings traffic to my site.
Twitter advertising is cheap and when done correctly it is useful. Instagram also brings traffic, what I want to say yes google is big but you do not need to rely alone on google. If Google neglect because of the health niche then look elsewhere to rank and bring traffic to your site. There are so many options.
There are so many sites where you can advertise your business for free, like Citysearch, Manta, Yelp, HotFrog, BOTW, Cyclex, Find us here, and so on be creative and use different ways and eventually, you will rank again in Google.
Hope this helped
Cheers Sylvia
So by "use" you mean advertize.
There is no separate indexation on duck duck as far as I know. They take stuff from other search engines.
I would keep going with the site. Even though sites got hit with the Google update, the update also penalized sites it didn't consider and "authority".
So do things that will help build your authority. Continue posting And letting the site age. Show Google you aren't going anywhere. Low comp keywords. Keywords where you are the best option to rank. Google will have no choice but to rank you on super low comp keywords.
Also, create a YouTube And make complimentary videos for your posts. Link your website in the description and the article you are creating the video for.
Consider Instagram also... You have to be careful spreading yourself too thin, but starting from scratch should be a last resort because you do reset your clock.
Thank you, Chris, I will definitely follow your advice and also start doing YouTube videos on my articles.
See more comments
For maybe the first time, I agree with Google 110% for cracking down on the health/fitness sites. Being an authority in my niche, I get sick of people pretending to be knowledgeable in that niche just because they got a certificate off the internet for a couple hundred bucks.
People are getting hurt and missing work that hire these UN-professionals. In fact many states are requiring Personal Trainers to have insurance just like a Dentist.
I have $1M dollars of liability insurance and any trainer who does not, is NOT qualified to train anyone. Would you use a Doctor, Surgeon, or any professional that does not have insurance?
I did not think so. They are just as bad as scammers.
Giving bad advice to others in my field gets you homeless fast.
Mark