yeay recovery from Googles update- euh, NO!
I hate to burst your bubble, but if you have seen a rise in your Google search console stats, you might think, or some people here will claim:
'See, it has always been like this in my 'years of experience" , Google does updates, you work HARD on what Google wants, and your traffic will come back!
Don't fall for this..
This may look exciting, but I am NOT 'recovering' at all , for the moment.
In the statistics for a year, before Googles update from September 2023 (HCU update), I am FAR from where I was before that update. (in Google alone I mean, I already had other traffic sources)
If I have 'recovered' some traffic (about half of what it was before), it is totally due to the things I have done on my socials to get traffic back.
Yes, the update isn't over yet, there's still three weeks to go.
But I'm still NOT thinking about 'what Google thinks of my site" or "what keywords are looking good in Jaaxy", as a matter of fact: the posts that are now getting traffic back on Google search console, are all keywords I haven't looked up in Jaaxy at all.
The last few months, I have focussed on topics that people discuss on my facebook groups or others or what has been asked on Reddit and such.
I even took a look at Facebook Ads in my niche and I noticed that people wondered about certain brands, and I wrote about those brands!
By "coïncedence", these are the posts that now get traffic in GSC, BUT these are all written AFTER THE MARCH UPDATE.
My site HASN'T RECOVERED FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2023 HCU UPDATE , at all!
Because it got a side-wide classifier 'hit', which means that in September, Google basically said: it's not just some of your content that s**ks, but it is your COMPLETE SITE that is ridiculous!
So usually, I lose bets, but I want to bet 50 bucks that I won't 'recover' to back before the September 2023 google update.
We'll see, but please stop the framing and gaslighting of small niche websites by saying ' well your content wasn't that great" before the September update, but now we are going to reverse this , because now we do think it is.
I'm not depending on SEO any longer, it has been proven that for many niches it isn't worth it just focussing on Google and what 'they want'. Because one day they want your content, the next they don't.
And it will only get worse in the future, because people are looking more for information on socials anyway, especially the younger generation, and will have AI search as well coming up soon.
SEO's and 'marketeers' should really start to see this, some of them already are, mostly the ones that have made money before with a niche site. Don't believe the SEO's who have never made an actual site for themselves and made money with it. A majority of niche sites HAVE been hit and no, they aren't 'recovering' either, because recovery would mean that they have AT LEAST as much traffic as before the September update AND higher, because almost a year has past! (if you continued to work on your site)
That should be the TRUE statistics if you would talk about 'recovery', which this isn't! I had statistics in high-school, and it was hell to understand it, it is a high level of mathematics, and this isn't 'Google rewarding you for your hard work', it's just a cookie from Google, while they are investing in Reddit and their AI.
I know some people will now say: 'you just say that because you have a grutch against Google', stop that please, it is reality!
And it shows in my general traffic in GA4: traffic was on the rise due to socials, Bing and newsletters, so yes: people appreciate my content, just Google is being schizophrenic and unreliable.
And I'm not the only one. Large websites that reviewed their own products in all sincerity took a nosedive as well, were loud about it on Twitter, and even got invited to Google's office for a tour, and you know what: their traffic rose again and still rising. While leaving them with nothing for almost a whole year.
Would you still go back to an ex-partner when he or she treated you like that for a whole year? I wouldn't.
Moral of the story: I will just go on with what I'm doing now and that is focussing on my socials
At WA: please up your game, because 'get your AI bulk content out there' isn't going to work for a lot of people. because those people 9/10 aren't really looking for what people really want to know in their niche. What they want to know, is out there on socials and on forums.
Lizzy
classifier
Recent Comments
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Hi Lizzy
Yeah, AI has changed the entire online marketing space and search engines are attempting to deal with it as best they can.
The days of writing great content with good SEO practices as the sole means to drive traffic to a website are over.
Social channels and video platforms have become indispensable for website success.
It’s just a matter of time before AI tech floods YouTube the way it has dominated written content.
Frank 🎸
Hi Lizzy!
Interesting post! Thanks for sharing.
One of my websites has the exact curve as your representation above. And yes, traffic doubled in the past few days.
Okay, I won't get too excited. I will focus on social media to drive traffic and on selling my own product.
Have a great day!
Very interesting. I do more on social media to direct traffic to my sites and will be adding YouTube back into the mix very soon. I recently added Pinterest and saw an improvement in my visits and other stats. I had been using Facebook for years and do see growth there, too.
Thanks for sharing this. I thought maybe things were getting better again, but alas over 60% of my traffic comes from social media, about 10% from direct links and less than 30% from Google or other search engines.
Karin
As regards AI content, mass production has led Google to have an infrastructure challenge.
The amount of content Google has to crawl, render and index is massive and it’s growing daily with AI-written content.
Google’s data centers can’t handle it.
So, Google is resulting to shortcuts such as reducing the crawl budget for websites that have a higher volume of content in comparison to their trust rating.
This means that if you have lots of thin, unhelpful, generic content, Google likely won’t index it at all.
AI content needs to have personal experience of the subject added to it, not just published as it is.
But, of course, as you said, I personally believe that spending at least an equivalent amount of time on social media as you do on writing is the only way forward.
Once upon a time, Partha and I used to pride ourselves on the fact that we could get a website up to nearly 20,000 visitors per month in the first year without any social media whatsoever.
(But sadly, nearly all of that traffic was lost with the Google September update!)
I don't believe that's possible these days, and if I was ever to start a new website again, I would use social media from day one, in particular, Medium, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube.
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I know what you mean Lizzy,
Social media has been working for me also and driving traffic to my websites and sub domains.
Also, one of the main things that has really worked for me is creating 30 second+ video reels in Canva.
How do I do this?
I create a 30 second video in Canva and then save it to my computer.
Create a post on my website regarding the topic that is in the video.
Go to your social media: Facebook, X, YouTube shorts, TikTok or any other social media you use.
Add the post link from your website into a new comment section on your social media and add the video as an attachment, so people can watch the video and then click on the post link above the video after they have watched the video!
I have also done what Lizzy has advised below, add your website to you TikTok profile, there are people nosey enough to click on the website link to see where it goes to. Get that TikTok backlink guys! You can also embed your video into your post as HTML and use that post title as a direct link to add to your social media and select in your settings as featured image go people see the picture of the reel and click on it.
I admit, it takes absolutely hours to do what I have suggested above, but you will learn quite a lot about what makes people click on links.
People dont want to spend hours reading through posts on a website, they want to read a website excerpt, watch a video and then click on the link to buy the product.
Its a game changer!!
Regards
Brian