Awesome Dave, as long as your content is relevant and helpful, leveraging AI is the way to go to improve the efficiency of your business.

Yeah, that does suck. No doubt about it. I have been through many Google updates over the years so I know how that feels. I think the answer is that when things like this happen, to do your best to adapt and continue moving forward.

Regardless of what Google does at any given time, there will ALWAYS be an opportunity to thrive as an affiliate. It's ultimately just a matter of adapting your strategy as the industry evolves, and you're in the best possible place to do that here in WA given the education, tools, and community.

Maybe that means adapting your content strategy, working on integrating EEAT into your site as best as you can, starting a new site, using a different organic traffic source, diversifying your organic traffic sources, or learning how to leverage PPC. Whatever the case, it may not always be easy, but the opportunity is still massive and it is only getting bigger.

So I think the key is adapting and persisting when you face setbacks like this. Easier said than done, for sure, but that's how I see it.

Wishing you the best moving forward, Zarina. :)

I also had updates affecting me before and I kept on going regardless, I'm just concerned with the Google specifically.

I have diversified, I have different websites, I have a channel, so because of that I'm still more or less afloat/ok with the commissions, but like I said Google favouring forums or only huge websites for the most part (and seems like it's worse) is a concern not only for me.

Although I don't do EEAT very well, and I don't link to my social media because I want to maintain my privacy, so I know one issue in my case.

Will need to leverage AI too, look forward to WA's updates in this area.

Thanks for sharing, Tim!

Yeah, Google's algorithm updates can be mysterious and frustrating at times. One of the things I've noticed is they want to see folks demonstrating their experience in the niche. So for an outdoors site, for example, I've noticed the most successful sites tend to be people who actually go on outdoor hiking trips, take photos, buy products and test them for their reviews, make videos... stuff like that. It's like they want to see a certain level of authenticity that only a real human person who is in that space would be able to demonstrate. That's one of the things I've noticed anyways.

I've also seen perfectly good sites doing all the right things get impacted by the latest update, so the algorithm is far from perfect and it wouldn't surprise me if they did another update down the road that reduced the amount of forum listings and restored some of the rankings that were impacted by that. Time will tell.

About AI, I agree, I think the new AI writing platform is going to make a huge difference. WA members will be able to create better content faster and be in a position to scoop up a lot of high quality traffic moving forward.

Thank you for sharing, Tim!

And returning a bit of faith to me lol (although yeah, I recognize that in my case I don't have that EEAT part that Google wants, so I'll probably just sell the website to someone who wants to do that and build another one instead where I'm ok sharing to my profiles etc)

Thanks Brenda, and I agree - will be an exciting 2024 ahead!

Cheers Glenn.