Google Update Tanks Traffic
painscience.com
painscience.com
The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.
We at the SEO-institute-of-fill-in-the-blank can dramatically increase your traffic.
1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea.
2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.
3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.
I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.
I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfarm full of SEO gibberish. Or to use a common example, suppose you make a no-nonsense site with some nifty, original cooking recipes. You fall out of the search results because you aren't padding your recipes with pages of irrelevant anecdotes and other filler material. How is that "deserved"?
With that being said, google can recognize brands, influencers and leaders in a given industry - but if they dont actually explain their content or choose to do it in textbooks rather than online, why do you feel that their overly complicated expert opinion deserves to rank over some new site who tries to approach and explain the topic in a more simple way? Furthermore how can this unquestionable expert prove to a new user on their site they actually are an expert? Who cares if the other academics in a field look to this person as a leader, the general user needs to be convinced in a way that leverages experience, authority and trust.
You have to DESERVE to rank. It has always been that way. Yes there will be people who try and game the system, and that game will work for a set period of time, but not forever. They want to display the best content to the user. Just because someone is an expert does NOT mean they automatically have the best content or explain it in the most user friendly way. This has always been Google's M.O. and will be and is also how it should be.
EDIT: Content farm gibberish can outrank unoptimized better content - because its created specifically to game the system, and often those content farms spend more time building links or promoting the content. The bigger worry here is GPT3 and how that begins to erode the trust of content as a medium over time.
Not new cutting edge ideas that have passed your old ideas by, and Google is doing the world a favour.
A pile of garbage.
In fact i might google a spesific product, like a Monitor, and the top result will be "but Monitor XYZ on Amazon". When i click on the link, turns out they don't actually sell or stock that product at all!
With that being said, in any marketing tactic, the right way isn't always the best way - however - understanding why some garbage site ranks for your query is incredibly helpful in figuring out how you can improve your content to do the same.
It may be deserved because that's what many people want rather than a plain vanilla list of ingredients and instructions.
Industries that work on a workflow of hunting and fulfilling need SEO. People search for an item or service that they know exists and grab the top result.
Industries that work on a workflow of discoverability and browsing take advantage of social media. You didn't know you wanted that cute dress or household gadget until some listing pushed it into your attention.
Yes, you are taking on a big platform risk in that your business depends on Google continuing to serve you high amounts of traffic. Does that mean "you will go extinct one way or another", heck no.
Risk management is a big part of building a business. Just because there's a low chance that you could lose a significant chunk of your revenue overnight doesn't mean the business isn't worth starting.
Every company has risk (AWS, Stripe, npm, etc, etc, etc).
[1] Unless you're w3schools, for some reason.
Social media is not a replacement for a great web presence.
Yes. Also, Google is cracking down on off-brand sites pushing medical advice.
This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.
Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.
As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.
A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line.
Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.
Hey, I am working on basically this. E.g.: https://findka.com/u/jobryant (warning, takes ~10 seconds to load fully). You make a profile, add your top article/book/movie/music/etc recommendations, then you get (1) a feed of recommendations from people you follow, (2) an Explore page that gives you algorithmic recommendations (collaborative filtering, currently via an off-the-shelf SVD library).
Right now the curation is a little basic, but today I'm adding filter controls to profiles so you can see a person's recommendations for a specific content type. Eventually, I'd also like to add custom tags so you can have recommendation/awesome lists for anything.
The hard problem to solve is how do you get the absolute experts on the platform... and how do you get them to altruistically collaborate in the spirit of Wikipedia and the early web?
The opportunity is massive if you can solve this.
Take any sub niche of the internet / real world.
If you can find a way to get the 5 most intellectually influential people the subject to have their own profiles and work together to collaboratively manage a collection of important information for their community you've got a great asset platform.
If your platform does this repeatably and expands to a lot of other niches... you've got a unicorn startup on your hands because you now have a foundation for a search engine based on expert curation.
There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.
Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business.
Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.
This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative experts instead of absolute experts.
Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.
Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.
- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my email list, and was going to sell an info product.
- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the smaller guys out.
- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.
- I was one of the people who caused this change...
- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?
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The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.
We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to do with them?
My buddy Greg Isenberg constantly is talking about the unbundling of Reddit and honestly he is on to something. [1]
As Reddit continues to unbundle, how can we shape these into curation engines so at least our algos can get some usable data out of communities instead of them being an endless popularity contest.
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[1] https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-...
We used to call that DMOZ. Maybe it should be brought back.
Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs.
P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.
Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data: https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png
This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies.
It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money.
When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true.
Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking.
Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.
Is it because botnet attack makes your site slow, and make it lose google ranking ?
Google then lowers the rankings (or removes the blogs from Google). All they have to do is run an update script to update all the domains with the blog link, and Google lowers their rankings.
"Google Webmasters @googlewmc · Aug 11 On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated. Thank you for your patience!"
https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921...
Edit: author says no https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...
> With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.
I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be interested in knowing what the updated views are.
And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.
I got what you meant but I think you have the words flipped. Google's customers are advertisers and the consumers of their products are users like you and me.
If you train NLP on text generated by NLP, you're gonna have a bad time.
I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam.
At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.
B - Google does and will continue to capture that traffic, and it will continue to get better. Case in point, I read earlier this week an article about a site devoted to celebrity net worth and how their business was eaten up by the change.
C - Agree that more involved information is safe or safer.
But you know, it is obvious that Google will continue to eat up more and more queries. I don't know what percentage they are currently able to eat up and keep to themselves, but they are surely devoted to upping that rate. So as a long term play, do you really want to put yourself in competition with all the Google data scientists?
I think it's the best strategy. If you have a business, like the celebrity net worth one, you're in trouble. It's worth keeping in mind these days if your business has long term staying power based on the trends we know are currently underway.
You can absolutely "win" at some of those without kingly content.
Will the ELIZAs learn to know each other somehow and throttle input, or will we someday approach the critical mass necessary for endless GPT-3 comment chains? Is there a similar term for Kessler Syndrome, but applied to comments?
Google already provides no-click search answers by scraping data from a website and bolding a paragraph that may answer your question. The branding of the original site is removed on these snippets.
How long before Google decides not to link out the website altogether?
Google has strategically bought every browser address box. It has eliminated the referrer , so websites don't know what search keywords led them there. It owns the whole process, and at this point , web content is just fodder for the next iterations of NLP models. It's already become cheap enough and it will become unmonetizable (unless it's opinion content, which is fodder for endless social media rambling).
Currently the most monetizable content is video. This might take longer to commoditize as deepfakes are still too early.
You can afford to do that if the website is not your primary source of income , not everyone has that luxury.
Online small and medium biz have to pay for their expenses , it is not for ad driven models either , organic traffic is significant source for people to purchase of your site. if your content is invisible to google for most sites that is a killing blow .
Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.
You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.
The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.
When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.
Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.
Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint.
We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.
Matt Cutts answers the question: "Does Google consider SEO to be spam?"
Many SEO professionals help businesses by writing the content people search for. Their goal is not to trick Google, but to write content that deserves the top spot. A mattress retailer may not have the first clue how to write content that is useful to people who want to buy mattresses, but SEOs and professional writers can do it for them.
Additionally, Mr. Mattress Retailer has no idea about the technical aspects of content that help Google to understand it: site navigation, meta data, schema data, and so on. Technical SEOs can help them out. The result is content that's relevant to the right audience, informative, and published with all the extra stuff that helps Google to make sense of it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...
"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"
Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.
This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.
I scanned his site, I see no newsletter. I think that's an extraordinary mistake, to not have been leveraging all that free Google traffic all those years to build up something like that. You use the free Google traffic to make Google unnecessary to your business, that should always be your focus (of what to utilize the Google traffic for) while the freebie traffic is still flowing.
100% this guy would have been better off building a wholly independent newsletter type service that had zero dependence on Google and could be built out via other means (once it's cash flowing you can legitimately advertise it to build subscribers up, it becomes free-standing and self-building as a real business, Google is almost entirely cut out of the situation then, and anything you get from Google traffic is a bonus). The beauty of a newsletter, again if it's applicable to what you're doing, is it's a free agent, you're not going to be dependent on a singular traffic source, you can take advantage of all of them without much fear of losing your business because one traffic source vanishes.
He still has some search traffic, I'd put all of my effort into building a newsletter on the back of what's left, there might still be time to unlock from Google this way while using Google's remaining search traffic to kick free.
As a bonus he can also still sell/promo his books via a newsletter.