Hacker News Reader

Comment by abatilo | Hacker News Reader

After about 2 years, I somehow started getting Google traffic to one of my websites. It wasn't much, maybe 1k to 2k views a month.

I didn't touch the website at all in those 2 years and when I started getting traffic from Google, I decided that maybe I should setup the Google search console SEO best practices.

I went through their entire checklist and my traffic went to flat 0. I scored a perfect 100 across every category on their web page insights and my reward was getting completely delisted from all of their search results.

View on HN

I had similar experiences in my self-help blog. I wasn't sure was it indeed due to "optimisations" or just a coincidence... :upside_down_smile_emoji:

The guidance was probably written by an internal Google equivalent of the agency in the article, not a Google engineer who knows how everything works.

You're probably right but my naive hope was that things like PageSpeed insights that measure things like accessibility and page speed would be a part of search rankings.

I went from an average page rank position of 4 for relevant keywords to nothing and now there's 0 growth for views of my site. I'd have been better off just not touching it at all. Sad.

Prior to making changes, I had consistent 30% MoM growth for 4 months in a row and all from Google results.

That sounds... deeply frustrating. I've not done this stuff before, so the only thing I can suggest is: could you back out the changes and see if that makes a difference?

It's very possible and I considered it. But the UI/UX changes I made improved accessibility, and I decided that I'd rather keep those changes as I think they make for a better website anyways.

Maybe ironically, my analytics provider (not Google) has recently started showing the tiniest upwards momentum in Bing being a top referrer. Since all my traffic grew steadily after 2 years of no changes, I'm now curious to see what happens if I continue to just let it sit there.

The first mistake was trusting google on anything

Reply on news.ycombinator.com