Google Core Update wiped 40% of my traffic and Here's my game plan

byKennyLee

1.7K followers

5 years ago

I'm in a rush to write this, it'll be unorganized but if your website is getting a major decline in traffic in April, please read. I hope it will help.

On 1st of April, I thought Google Analytics was playing an April Fool joke on me. It was the start where I saw a 40% decrease in search traffic.

Of course, as my site is focused on Amazon, that means the earning is almost decreased by half.

I was previously hitting $600-$700 range in the past 2 months but I'll be lucky to hit $450 this month.

I never thought it was the Google Update, until a member told me about that.

I head over to Google Search console and check the position of my traffic-generating pages. About 40% of them dropped from page 1 to page 4 and beyond.

If you've ever had your website's traffic diminished by a significant amount, you'll know that the first thing is hitting the panic button.

I searched frantically on the Internet, but experts are equally clueless on the nature of the update. No one know exactly what this update is targeting, unlike the previous Google Medic or Panda.

But there are clear indications that health/medic sites are seeing major changes in the traffic. Dr. Axe is gaining visibility while smaller niche sites are affected.

My core strategy is creating "best of" article list to rank and it's easy for affiliate sites to rank. But for some reason, authority sites like WebMd, HealthLine are getting the priority for the search phrase that are easy for affiliates.

I used to rank on #1 page for 'best panax ginseng', but it has been relegated to the 5-6. page

So, I use Jaaxy, Google Search Console and a spreadsheet to map out all my money-earning sites.

Not all of my pages are affected. I have about 60% of the pages still on #1. But a 40% decrease in earning is substantial, when I'm living in a country with where the currency is 4x weaker than USD.

I found a pattern on the drop in rank

All of my pages that drop in ranking uses keyword like "anxiety, depression, insomnia"

For example, 'best kava for anxiety"

I suspect that the Google Core Update is getting stricter with sites in the health/medical niche.

My Game Plan To Bounce Back

Since no one knows what exactly the Google Core Update is all about, I have to rely on the pattern that I've found.

I'm going to revise the page that's affected, and make it less 'medical' related. That means I'll use wellness instead of anxiety. Or stress instead of depression. Sleep instead of insomnia.

The contents need to be modified to make it more general instead of targeting a specific medical condition.

Because pages that uses non-medical terms are still at #1.

I'm not sure if this is the true cause of what's happening. But since the SEO experts are still figuring out what's the cause and Google offers no fix for affected sites, this is the only way forward.

I'll get cracking right now and pray that my pages will be back on top soon.

In the mean time, I'm still pushing hard to work on another site that hopefully rakes in money by Q3.

Hope this helps

Cheers,
Kenny

P.S. : does your site suffer from Google Core Update? I'll like to hear how it turns out for you.