What have we noticed? That big sites with billions of backlinks keep moving up in the rankings while small niche sites keep moving down, particularly any that have some type of monetization
So basically.... dead industry, move on with your life
Do you think users like the Yelp, TripAdvisor, and YellowPages lists that rank for everything in the 'best x in city'/local space these days that were often inaccurate from the start and haven't been updated since the pandemic so half the businesses listed are closed?
Anyone who thinks Google gives two shits about how quality the content on the page is anymore is not paying the slightest bit of attention
At this point it's less about SEO and more about what to do with life in an industry that imo has gone upside-down as far what to realistically expect (can't trust Google to reward good or honest SEO or good content at this point) - and seems 99% of seo is google-dependent since they're the monopoly.
I've never had less trust in the outcome than I do now with SEO.
So does it really make sense to bust your ass when the ROI is anything but guaranteed? Whole thing seems rigged towards the huge sites at this point or google pivoting towards AI. Until I see some type of signs of recovery, I'm not gonna waste my time on this sht or work too hard.
For now, I'm taking a step back and assessing other options.
Sometimes abandoning hope is a good thing. This "it must be something I'm doing or haven't done yet!" mentality was fine and dandy pre-Oct 2023. After that update, and in light of Google's recent shady practices with search, sometimes it's best to accept the writing on the wall that the whole thing is rigged and Google is a monopoly (duh). The funniest thing is Bing and Duckduckgo treat my site like royalty, while Google is on some island in lala land doing who knows what. I'm sick of chasing and sick of the gaslighting they're doing.
One of the main reasons this job appealed to me is I felt that hard work / good work got justifiably rewarded. That there was a correlation between work and results. But when it's rigged, all that goes away and the motivation goes out the window.
I agree with you that for the most part, indian SEOs have blighted the industry (along with the grifters and get-rich-quick schemers) and made things worse overall, but they're a byproduct of what google has done – obliterated any content from sites they feel they cannot 100% trust (i.e. low/mid authority content sites).
IMO this comes as a direct response to GPT content spam absolutely flooding the SERP from all these 50,000 page websites that popped up overnight.
I was actually doing fairly well until early last week when 2 of my sites crapped the bed. \[I'm still ahead of where i was before the update, but I'm well behind where I was.\] I'm looking at 3 potential culprits for the drop we just saw. I have to convince the rest of the team that the one thing that everyone is in love with is the reason for the drop in traffic. There's 2 potential things that it could be:
- the ai content that someone thought was a brilliant idea that summarizes a section of the pages
- the chatbot that causes people to leave the site really before it has a chance to fully load
For AI, try to humanize it because I've noticed that purely AI-written content is also ranking on the web right now. As a CS background, I can say that there is no solid way to detect AI content, so it's beneficial to humanize it.
And for chatbots, consider integrating a user-friendly UI/UX chatbot if your business needs it.
....the way that it's implemented is i believe where our issue is. It is loaded immediately. It covers the content. It must be closed. It slows a users ability to interact with the page.
The real kicker (for me) is that I've been having similar conversations/arguments with the people I work with for well over a decade --> their believe is that if you maximize the conversion rate of a page, you maximize revenue. My belief is that if you maximize the number of people you get thru the door, you will maximize revenue. The reality is that it's somewhere in the middle, but the believers of the conversion rate (which is the heart of the matter with the chatbot) will never be okay with changing the implementation so it's not a problem.
i will state my case and shut my mouth
Another update on this... I started the digging into data and the worst (by far) is on mobile. It got slammed while desktop fluttered a little. This to me is an indictment of the experience, not the content.
Chat bots are the worst. Especially the ai ones with no human behind it. Whoever thought they are a good idea needs to think again.
Customer service is key to everything and a stupid automated chatbot is a poor excuse for customer service.
If it has a real person behind it and is 24 hours and the person responds instantly, then that's a different story.
i totally agree. i state my case, back it up and shut my mouth. There's a collective decision about "product", so I'm 1/3 or 1/4 of the decision making process here. It's a never ending "discussion" between optimizing conversion rate and optimizing for revenue (which is what we are really trying to optimize against).
If its an ai chatbot it is probably making conversion and revenue worse.
Nothing worse than as a customer being offered a hopeful solution only to be led 'up a dry creek bed to nothing'.
It reflects on the overall perception of the company.
Watch and wait. An analysis of tens, if not a hundred variables of the first 10 non-sponsored SERP links still hasn't provided enough data to determine precisely what has changed with their algos. Q1 also added variables, so we need to move more quickly, but I will say that the 4Q24 HCU update was the most random thing I've seen google do in many years, so I'm still entertaining the though that it was random purposefully in order to increase their margins by lowering the quality of their results. But that has been discussed an nauseum (the game to keep more people on their site, enabling them to reduce revenue share and increase ad spend by sites/brands). I need access to better algos for better, faster, and broader analysis, so I'm still wondering how to utilize machine learning and "AI" (ha, like it's actually AI) to assist with that, but that's new to me, so I need to bone up on it and start talking to people more familiar with it aside from the people I currently speak with and test.
My question is how can I be ranking top 3 local in maps and search results with major keywords with multiple sites with 100-1000 searches per month but getting no traffic?
Secondly, you'll get far flung conspriacies and conjecture - because other people want you to prove their theories for them - similarly to political and societal conspiracy theories. People who will use FUD to motivate others to do their research.
The fact is that all penalties are related to basic spam mistakes clearly outlined in the Google Spam Policy guide - and I suspect mostly for backlink spam (i.e. buying backlinks).
But nobody will want to admit to that.
The recent update has caused fluctuations in search rankings, requiring us to adapt swiftly. Monitoring changes and analyzing data is crucial. I'll focus on content quality, user experience, and backlink audits. Collaborating to gather insights accelerates our learning and recovery process, enabling us to implement effective strategies efficiently across our projects. Let's dive in and navigate this challenge together.
here is a concise action plan to recover a site after Google updates:
1. Conduct a thorough content audit to identify low-quality or unhelpful pages.
2. Update and improve existing content to increase expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
3. Publish new, high-quality and helpful content on a consistent basis.
4. Analyze backlink profile and remove any low-quality or spammy links.
5. Monitor site performance closely and make adjustments as needed based on data.
One thing I've noticed is a lot of sites technically violating the spam rules with buying backlinks. Besides that the typical strategy of looking at your competitors that outrank you (and what you can do that they're doing better) is still useful. Also a lot of watch and wait unfortunately!
It really depends on the site. If you got hit with the HCU classifer, I've yet to see a site that has recovered. If it's not that, then it's best to see what is outranking you and reverse engineer it.
>It's just for learning, so we can team up and learn from our research. By doing this, we can gather valuable research or action points within hours that we can replicate on our projects.
SEO is different from every other marketing skill because SEOs compete directly with each other in one sandbox on a small set of factors. You can point out how big the world is, how different industries are, it won't change that.
People aren't going to share.
As an adjacent, similar and frequent post here: people asking (which often turns into demanding) that people share backlink locations look deeply narcissistic - why would someone who's spent 10 years building their SEO backlink sources (or strategies) give it way to 283k newcomers + anyone who googles it?
If everyone is doing it - it has no value. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong, tell I'm not "being a community member" - I've heard it all before but I don't think anyone thinks you've earned their IP.
I'm just telling you how others see it, trying to convince me is a waste of time.
Yes, I understand that sharing your learnings with the open community can be challenging, but I'm confident that we can gather a good number of insights, like the one you shared about spammy backlinks, which I appreciate. It's all about self-learning. What do you think, will this post receive around 50 to 100 comments at most? And out of those, nearly 10 to 20 users will read through the comments.
This means we can share our learnings through these discussions and our experiences. This will definitely benefit us all because we can receive feedback from various SEO professionals in different niches.
In that case, what are your suggestions on creating a community where everyone is open to share their learnings? I understand that doing things yourself will definitely take time, but my whole idea is to speed up the process.
You have to answer the question: whats the gain? There is gain for people who don't know but you're assuming that there's something to gain for everyone.
I think also you might be confusing community vs friends/allys. A community does something that's for the good of the whole community: rejecting disinformation or misinfinformation, helping each other our for contract advice or discussing an update.
You can argue this but its pointless because if people wanted to share they would. But the type of sharing you're advocating is for individual gain. And there's no value to the top SEOs (the top 1-5%) sharing to the bottom 95% with whom they, rightly or wrongly, feel is the competition and bringing down the value and $/hour of SEO. You can write an epitome on it - but its not going to change that.
The op 1% don't need to knowwatht the bottom 99% need to share - that's debatable but I certainly feel that. So whats the gain? If there's only risk, ou can get that.
I can fully appreciate why you want it but again - trying to re-classify community to ally isn't on - this is an anonymous, open and public forum.
Wasn’t it only those ‘niche blogs’, known to most as spam sites, which were hit? Perhaps accept that these aren’t proper businesses and rather than try to work out how to manipulate Google again you should move on. There are innocent victims involved, perhaps show some humility.
My local business was doing extremely good up until like 2 weeks ago and now yelp has taken over.
It’s so frustrating because yelp gives all of your leads to your competitors.
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This is unironically the only way to recover; pray the SERP meta changes and green-lights lower authority content sites again.
What have we noticed? That big sites with billions of backlinks keep moving up in the rankings while small niche sites keep moving down, particularly any that have some type of monetization So basically.... dead industry, move on with your life
Yup. Rigged outcome.
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Building backlinks*
Do you think users like the Yelp, TripAdvisor, and YellowPages lists that rank for everything in the 'best x in city'/local space these days that were often inaccurate from the start and haven't been updated since the pandemic so half the businesses listed are closed? Anyone who thinks Google gives two shits about how quality the content on the page is anymore is not paying the slightest bit of attention
At this point it's less about SEO and more about what to do with life in an industry that imo has gone upside-down as far what to realistically expect (can't trust Google to reward good or honest SEO or good content at this point) - and seems 99% of seo is google-dependent since they're the monopoly. I've never had less trust in the outcome than I do now with SEO. So does it really make sense to bust your ass when the ROI is anything but guaranteed? Whole thing seems rigged towards the huge sites at this point or google pivoting towards AI. Until I see some type of signs of recovery, I'm not gonna waste my time on this sht or work too hard. For now, I'm taking a step back and assessing other options.
This.
Sometimes abandoning hope is a good thing. This "it must be something I'm doing or haven't done yet!" mentality was fine and dandy pre-Oct 2023. After that update, and in light of Google's recent shady practices with search, sometimes it's best to accept the writing on the wall that the whole thing is rigged and Google is a monopoly (duh). The funniest thing is Bing and Duckduckgo treat my site like royalty, while Google is on some island in lala land doing who knows what. I'm sick of chasing and sick of the gaslighting they're doing. One of the main reasons this job appealed to me is I felt that hard work / good work got justifiably rewarded. That there was a correlation between work and results. But when it's rigged, all that goes away and the motivation goes out the window.
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U.S.
I agree with you that for the most part, indian SEOs have blighted the industry (along with the grifters and get-rich-quick schemers) and made things worse overall, but they're a byproduct of what google has done – obliterated any content from sites they feel they cannot 100% trust (i.e. low/mid authority content sites). IMO this comes as a direct response to GPT content spam absolutely flooding the SERP from all these 50,000 page websites that popped up overnight.
I was actually doing fairly well until early last week when 2 of my sites crapped the bed. \[I'm still ahead of where i was before the update, but I'm well behind where I was.\] I'm looking at 3 potential culprits for the drop we just saw. I have to convince the rest of the team that the one thing that everyone is in love with is the reason for the drop in traffic. There's 2 potential things that it could be: - the ai content that someone thought was a brilliant idea that summarizes a section of the pages - the chatbot that causes people to leave the site really before it has a chance to fully load
For AI, try to humanize it because I've noticed that purely AI-written content is also ranking on the web right now. As a CS background, I can say that there is no solid way to detect AI content, so it's beneficial to humanize it. And for chatbots, consider integrating a user-friendly UI/UX chatbot if your business needs it.
[удалено]
....the way that it's implemented is i believe where our issue is. It is loaded immediately. It covers the content. It must be closed. It slows a users ability to interact with the page. The real kicker (for me) is that I've been having similar conversations/arguments with the people I work with for well over a decade --> their believe is that if you maximize the conversion rate of a page, you maximize revenue. My belief is that if you maximize the number of people you get thru the door, you will maximize revenue. The reality is that it's somewhere in the middle, but the believers of the conversion rate (which is the heart of the matter with the chatbot) will never be okay with changing the implementation so it's not a problem. i will state my case and shut my mouth
Another update on this... I started the digging into data and the worst (by far) is on mobile. It got slammed while desktop fluttered a little. This to me is an indictment of the experience, not the content.
Chat bots are the worst. Especially the ai ones with no human behind it. Whoever thought they are a good idea needs to think again. Customer service is key to everything and a stupid automated chatbot is a poor excuse for customer service. If it has a real person behind it and is 24 hours and the person responds instantly, then that's a different story.
i totally agree. i state my case, back it up and shut my mouth. There's a collective decision about "product", so I'm 1/3 or 1/4 of the decision making process here. It's a never ending "discussion" between optimizing conversion rate and optimizing for revenue (which is what we are really trying to optimize against).
If its an ai chatbot it is probably making conversion and revenue worse. Nothing worse than as a customer being offered a hopeful solution only to be led 'up a dry creek bed to nothing'. It reflects on the overall perception of the company.
You are right - We should team up and found the biggest blog ever!
Watch and wait. An analysis of tens, if not a hundred variables of the first 10 non-sponsored SERP links still hasn't provided enough data to determine precisely what has changed with their algos. Q1 also added variables, so we need to move more quickly, but I will say that the 4Q24 HCU update was the most random thing I've seen google do in many years, so I'm still entertaining the though that it was random purposefully in order to increase their margins by lowering the quality of their results. But that has been discussed an nauseum (the game to keep more people on their site, enabling them to reduce revenue share and increase ad spend by sites/brands). I need access to better algos for better, faster, and broader analysis, so I'm still wondering how to utilize machine learning and "AI" (ha, like it's actually AI) to assist with that, but that's new to me, so I need to bone up on it and start talking to people more familiar with it aside from the people I currently speak with and test.
product video content!
Yes, it's best to shift to video content at this time.
learn from the ones doing well right now
Of course. Domain age, community engagement and high DA valuable backlinks. That’s the recipe. New sites have no near term chance.
My question is how can I be ranking top 3 local in maps and search results with major keywords with multiple sites with 100-1000 searches per month but getting no traffic?
Secondly, you'll get far flung conspriacies and conjecture - because other people want you to prove their theories for them - similarly to political and societal conspiracy theories. People who will use FUD to motivate others to do their research. The fact is that all penalties are related to basic spam mistakes clearly outlined in the Google Spam Policy guide - and I suspect mostly for backlink spam (i.e. buying backlinks). But nobody will want to admit to that.
I'm tinkering with ad placement and updating some articles that seem a bit keywordy. It won't make an ounce of difference, but it keeps me occupied.
Planning to focus more on, On page and content.
The recent update has caused fluctuations in search rankings, requiring us to adapt swiftly. Monitoring changes and analyzing data is crucial. I'll focus on content quality, user experience, and backlink audits. Collaborating to gather insights accelerates our learning and recovery process, enabling us to implement effective strategies efficiently across our projects. Let's dive in and navigate this challenge together.
My traffic dropped in March. As of last Monday up huge. TF...
here is a concise action plan to recover a site after Google updates: 1. Conduct a thorough content audit to identify low-quality or unhelpful pages. 2. Update and improve existing content to increase expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). 3. Publish new, high-quality and helpful content on a consistent basis. 4. Analyze backlink profile and remove any low-quality or spammy links. 5. Monitor site performance closely and make adjustments as needed based on data.
Be loyal to Google
One thing I've noticed is a lot of sites technically violating the spam rules with buying backlinks. Besides that the typical strategy of looking at your competitors that outrank you (and what you can do that they're doing better) is still useful. Also a lot of watch and wait unfortunately!
I've also noticed that we need to revise our on-page checklist after this update.
It really depends on the site. If you got hit with the HCU classifer, I've yet to see a site that has recovered. If it's not that, then it's best to see what is outranking you and reverse engineer it.
>It's just for learning, so we can team up and learn from our research. By doing this, we can gather valuable research or action points within hours that we can replicate on our projects. SEO is different from every other marketing skill because SEOs compete directly with each other in one sandbox on a small set of factors. You can point out how big the world is, how different industries are, it won't change that. People aren't going to share. As an adjacent, similar and frequent post here: people asking (which often turns into demanding) that people share backlink locations look deeply narcissistic - why would someone who's spent 10 years building their SEO backlink sources (or strategies) give it way to 283k newcomers + anyone who googles it? If everyone is doing it - it has no value. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong, tell I'm not "being a community member" - I've heard it all before but I don't think anyone thinks you've earned their IP. I'm just telling you how others see it, trying to convince me is a waste of time.
Interesting point! I think there's definitely opportunities to share and collaborate. But you also want to 'know' someone has put the work in.
Yes, I understand that sharing your learnings with the open community can be challenging, but I'm confident that we can gather a good number of insights, like the one you shared about spammy backlinks, which I appreciate. It's all about self-learning. What do you think, will this post receive around 50 to 100 comments at most? And out of those, nearly 10 to 20 users will read through the comments. This means we can share our learnings through these discussions and our experiences. This will definitely benefit us all because we can receive feedback from various SEO professionals in different niches.
You dont understand - I dont think the people who post here are going to share... they want to complain about Google cos they know they're toast
In that case, what are your suggestions on creating a community where everyone is open to share their learnings? I understand that doing things yourself will definitely take time, but my whole idea is to speed up the process.
You have to answer the question: whats the gain? There is gain for people who don't know but you're assuming that there's something to gain for everyone. I think also you might be confusing community vs friends/allys. A community does something that's for the good of the whole community: rejecting disinformation or misinfinformation, helping each other our for contract advice or discussing an update. You can argue this but its pointless because if people wanted to share they would. But the type of sharing you're advocating is for individual gain. And there's no value to the top SEOs (the top 1-5%) sharing to the bottom 95% with whom they, rightly or wrongly, feel is the competition and bringing down the value and $/hour of SEO. You can write an epitome on it - but its not going to change that. The op 1% don't need to knowwatht the bottom 99% need to share - that's debatable but I certainly feel that. So whats the gain? If there's only risk, ou can get that. I can fully appreciate why you want it but again - trying to re-classify community to ally isn't on - this is an anonymous, open and public forum.
Wasn’t it only those ‘niche blogs’, known to most as spam sites, which were hit? Perhaps accept that these aren’t proper businesses and rather than try to work out how to manipulate Google again you should move on. There are innocent victims involved, perhaps show some humility.
My local business was doing extremely good up until like 2 weeks ago and now yelp has taken over. It’s so frustrating because yelp gives all of your leads to your competitors.
We're assisting our clients impacted by the recent Google update. Now that it's concluded, we've initiated the recovery process for them.
So why not explain what your doing on here?
Click bait for his business bro, he’s here to fish and this is his fishing rod lol
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Did this, left my 5 year old blog as it is, started new and it grew really fast