Time to Ask for Expert Help

Hi everyone,

I hope you're all doing well.

I'm writing this blog post both as a progress update and a request for guidance from the experienced members here at WA.

My Underwhelming Progress

It's nearly been 100 days since I joined WA, and that's a milestone I was looking forward to.

I know that three months aren't enough whatsoever to see any financial success, but I was expecting to see some traction, to see a gradual increase in traffic, perhaps make my first small commission.

Unfortunately, this still looks like a very distant goal.

Here are my stats on Google and Bing respectively over the last 3 months:

As you can see, my impressions on Google have been dealt a massive blow since the 1st of November.

Partha suggested that the culprit is the November update. He said that even newer sites like mine can get hit.

Diane suggested that these are normal fluctuations and that I shouldn't read too much into it.

Now that it's been two months since the update, I think it's safe to say that these aren't fluctuations — there's a much bigger problem here.

You can see from the chart that back in October, I used to have around 50 daily impressions on Google, so the fact that my daily impressions are now consistently less than 10 is very strange, especially given that I have more than twice as many articles now.

Also, we all know that the search volume of Bing is way smaller than Google, so the fact that my stats are twice as high on Bing says a lot about the issue.

Before I ask for advice, let me give you some background to fill you in on the whole picture.

Blogging

Other than the About Me, Privacy Policy, and Affiliate Disclosure pages, I have published a total of 50 posts so far, 4 of which are product reviews — the rest are purely informational and helpful content.

I can say with full confidence that my content is high quality.

If you have the time and are willing to do me a favour and check that out for yourself, please go ahead and select a post and give it a quick read. My website is linked on my WA profile.

I use AI assistance to write my posts, but I definitely don't publish AI content out of the box. Some articles take me days to complete.

This is all to say that I'm positive that the quality of my content is not the problem.

Other Efforts

Other than blogging, I'm working on two methods to increase my brand awareness:

1. Pinterest
2. Quora

I'm fully aware that Quora is a long game, so I'm not expecting anything in the short run.

However, I've been doing reasonably well on Pinterest for a start. Here are my stats over the last month:

I've been watching Jay's Pinterest series and asking the Pinterest guru AndyCalvin for advice, so I'm hoping that I can keep improving my performance on Pinterest.

That's all regarding my off-site endeavours.

DA and Spam Score

I believe that an important part of this discussion is my website's domain authority (DA) and spam score.

Moz gives my website a DA of only 2, and whopping Spam Score of 75%.

Partha told me that increasing DA requires backlinks, and this is something that I plan to start dedicating time towards.

Regarding the Spam Score, when I looked into it, it turns out that for some reason, a weird website apparently created in 2009 somehow links to my website on 81 occasions!

I was told by many people that this shouldn't be a factor, as Google wouldn't penalize you because some spammy website decided to link to you.

However, when I read further about this today, I'm afraid I found otherwise.

Moz themselves say that the Spam Score is the percentage of sites with similar features that have been penalized or banned by Google.

This means that 75% of websites similar to mine have been penalized by Google.

Why on Earth would that be the case? I'm positive that I'm doing a better job than many.

I took matters into my own hands and searched about how to solve this problem. Apparently, the way to do this is to disavow the links by creating a .txt file with the domains that you want no association with, and then uploading it to the Google Search console. I did that today.

Google says that any changes may take a few weeks to be reflected. I'm hoping that my Spam Score goes down and that I perhaps start seeing tangible improvements in my Google impressions as a result.

I Would Appreciate Your Advice

I'm very frustrated.

But the upside of being part of a large community like Wealthy Affiliate is the opportunity to connect with experienced people and learn from their expertise.

They say that to know the road ahead, you should ask those coming back.

If you've encountered similar problems when you first started out and managed to solve them, please share your experience with me.

If you have multiple websites and noticed something similar in one of your newer sites, please share your experience with me.

Thank you for reading.

Yusuf