I'm a relatively new blogger, having only started my blog around 6 months ago. I started my blog simply because I enjoy providing helpful informati...
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Google clearly has lost his way in many directions.
Anyway on a practical level, what you need is to have the emails of your favorite readers.
When you publish an article, they then get the the article by email.
That's what Substack offers by default, and this is really powerful.
The combo blog + newsletter, but it's the same content.
It's basically like RSS in the old days, but using the email to PUSH articles to the readers, who can unsubscribe at any time and it's absolutely fine.
👉🏻 Ask the email from your favorite readers
Even Email is getting harder to do right, since the most popular email providers do a hard crackdown on email spam -> increasing the difficulty to do newsletter without getting classified as spam and/or getting completely blocked.
There's also an issue of being outright banned by the email services without breaking any rules. I had signed up to Sendgrid before I build my blog, and was banned the instant I completed my registration. It was instantaneous!
You'd think they'd have stopped me during the process and said "Hey, sorry ... we can't provide you with our service." But nope, I completed several pages and then finally at the end - boom - "You are banned. Do not try to make a new account. Do not try to contact us."... etc.
There was no reason given, but after dong a bit of research, I think it might have been because I was on a VPN, or possibly they don't allow Canadians? But I think VPN was the culprit. And I heard some other email providers like Sendgrid do the same, although I forget which ones.
Hah, funny you mention that, because adding a subscribe to email thing was on my possible to-do list! 😆
10-20 visits a day is nothing to be ashamed of. It's 10-20 visits more than my sites have ever had.
I looked for a "link in bio" to your site just to give you an extra visitor.
It's tough.. on a good week I might get 10-20 unique if I get links published elsewhere.
I don't currently have any active sites, but thanks :)
I so much agree with this article! After publishing over 100 articles and being consistent for over 2 years, Google decided to kill my blog's traffic. My blog traffic reached 15k views a month, and now I lost all my traffic, down to less than 3k views a month. I have over 100 articles on my blog, many of them updated. I'm now focusing more on newsletter and will try to optimize my blog for other search engines.
Man 15k view a month to 3k is no joke. That hurts!
In my case, I figured, well ... I wasn't getting much traffic anyway, so it is what it is. But when I see stories like yours I think "is it even worth trying?"
I think the only way to get traffic back up, or in my case, any traffic at all lol, is to employ avenues outside of Google. So for example, getting engagement on sites like dev.to, medium, possibly reddit? But basically making a presence on other social networks and engaging more with the users on those platforms. I'm far from an expert on this stuff though, so take my advice with a grain of salt! 🤓
Yes, I agree. I'm not a heavy social media user; I often don't promote my blog. But as you said, I'm looking at other search engines/venues.
Until last year, I would have said that blogging was worth it. Now, I'm not sure. I wouldn't say it's a complete waste of time. Last week I received an email from a user who found my blog via a Google search. These little things give me hope.
Blogging is very time-consuming, and the more you publish, the more you expect your blog to become successful. Also, growing an email list is difficult if no one sees your blog. :/
For sure. One thing I tried was to funnel everyone to the newsletter. I have a link to the permanent content on the website at the bottom of each post.
It's not the best but at least its measurable. And on sites like SubStack you might pick up subscribers from commenting on other newsletters.
I've found it actually helpful to not have any analytics on my sites. I don't need to care if there are people on my site, or how many there are.
I love it much more when I get a random contact on Mastodon telling that something is broken on my site.
That means somebody cares about it. And that is enough. Numbers are meaningless.
I feel your pain.
The problem with google is that they start to think they are internet. And they decide what is good and what is bad. While themselves are not being compliant with their own rules about layout shift, page optimalizations, javascript minification etc etc etc. Each year they decide something else "matters" and literally the whole world should rebuild their sites to be google compliant, with new measures implemented. Remember the json metadata we should put into our sites, to notify google of who is author, what kind of page it is, what is the title, image etc ... Yeah, it works, but only if you have SOMETHING TO SELL. The library of metadata is way bigger but google doesnt care about rest of this computer- readable data about persons, events etc, only recepies, stuff for sale, tickets .... Internet is not the same as e-commerce, and is full of usefull websites that have no power to rebuild every couple of weeks due to google, they focus on CONTENT, on WRITING actual articles for READERS. And that is what matters. Booo google, boooooo
Yup, absolutely! And part of the reason all of this is such an issue is that we have collectively let Google become the gatekeeper of the internet.
They control access to most of the highways, so it's either comply or die. Sigh.
Really well-written.
Honestly, the state of web search in general is in a really weird place.
Much appreciated Ben, and I agree things are weird.
What once started as an open and free space (regarding the internet in general), has slowly been devolving into this elite, exclusive, corporate playground of the top players. Kind of like how the world and society itself has been going for some time.
Only time will tell where things go, and if - hopefully - other non-shareholder fuelled search engines can make a dent.
That would explain some dips in web traffic on HowToAutoDetail.com recently, which is set up as wiki/informative site that links to a ton of different manufacturers and might look like spam to a bot or something. Oof. You have a well-written article even as the messenger of doom, haha. I need to go fix a few things apparently.
Checked out your site, popped you into my Feedly listing, so you have a least 1 organic reader as a little data point now :D
Thanks so much Marissa 😊
It certainly might. The annoying thing about these "Helpful Content Updates" is that it's not necessarily obvious when you're getting dinged by it, although a decent enough dip in traffic overnight without any changes on your end could very well be a definite sign.
And the other issue is what does Google constitute as "spam"? Google gives some guidance there, but some (on reddit) have pointed out that there are some very spammy, obvious ad-baiting affiliate-pushing sites, that don't seem affected, and are even being pushed higher in the rankings. 🤷🏻
I’m certainly not defending Google but I’ve been seeing all this talk about HCU and none of the sites I manage have lost traffic. Sorry this happened to you :( Google does whatever it wants and particularly does not care about the small sites.
I’ve been doing SEO and marketing since 2009. Seen some nasty drops over the years. The best thing is to start an email list. I use WordPress and MailPoet to run mine for free.
Yup, definitely seems not everyone is affected. I actually forgot to note the fact that some sites have seen an uptick since the updates, however some of those that initially saw an uptick in traffic then got the axe several months later as well.
It seems a bit all over the place, but certainly little guys like me with no "clout" don't stand much of a chance. But that's ok though, I'll just keep on truckin' without Google! 😊
Another reason to look for Google alternatives.
Thanks for linking your post - great points and ideas there!
I've actually been thinking more and more lately about my desire to move away from Google entirely.
Currently I use:
And I'm pretty sure the list goes on. For shame. 😳
Which ones? Yandex? But it is not popular in the world, there are many unknown search engines and sites, and which sites will go away, it depends on the content? Here is this resource, you can save it : wunderkiddy.com/materials#material...
Affiliate links was likely your downfall as it was mine many times. I've learned over the last 20 years that Google REALLY dislikes link building and affiliate links in particular.
To make matters worse, some links you choose to drop on your site can become associated with "bad neighborhood" penalties in Google's algo and once that happens with just one link, it's usually game over for the site and domain that got tossed into the penalty box. That's just my personal experience. I could be wrong about what's really going on these days as I stopped trying about 10 years back with the whole affiliate marketing stuff.
Unless you're earning real money with those links, I'd suggest simply dropping that practice and just focus on informative, interesting content that stokes your curiosity and passions. That at least keeps you out of their radar that targets this space.
I think you mentioned a key thing here - the "penalty" box. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened, whether due to affiliate links or not.
And I agree with you, and was even thinking before all this happened that I might as well just drop the links, as they're mostly pointless on my site. But as you and others have noted, once you're in Google's penalty box, you're pretty much stuck there for good unless you move to a new domain.
Funny though how Google is fine with their own ads, and fine with big sites trying to monetize traffic though. As usual for Google, "do as I say, not as I do" I suppose!
Great, great article.
I had no idea any of this existed! Just like you, all I want to do is write about the things that I find interesting and learn along the way. That's not enough, I guess.
I would love to contact you with some questions about this whole thing, blogging, tech, and tech blogging. I feel like I have been trying to get something off the ground for about a year or so but it's not going anywhere. I keep going back and forth between extremely niche and extremely mainstream. I know I could write about the topics that interest others the most, if you take a look at my profile you will see I have in the past. But I want to write about extremely niche topics, that most will never care about (all within the realm of tech, at least). Maybe (probably) I am doing something wrong, or looking at this from the wrong perspective.
By the way, wheresbaldo is the best name for a website, ever.
You've earned a subscriber either way.
haha, thanks! I'm bald, so it seemed like a good fit. 😄
Yeah, I know the feeling! And for sure, feel free to message me about any questions. I'm no expert, but am always glad to help where I can!
Ever feel like you are 20 years too late to the party? Me too.
I’ve seen and read a lot about this and I can’t help but believe this is a further shift toward a less open Internet. My strategy is to design web content that could be added to Common Crawl and potentially included in an LLM response. Thought being that if someone asks a chatbot a question it could potentially turn up my information as a result.
Does that drive traditional web traffic? Probably not but then again monetization of web content has long gone to the wayside. For what it’s worth I saw YouTube creator report the same dip in traffic to the point where the creator was questioning if the channel was sustainable.
So what can we do? Well links are gold and if you aren’t spreading the word on other platforms and using the “link in bio” you’re missing out. I love written content but these days if you aren’t producing video you are largely invisible to new audiences. Newsletters and sites like LinkedIn can work if you can engage with people and get conversations started.
At the end of the day you need to ask yourself why you are creating content. If you are trying to reach people then a blog probably isn’t the most effective. If you do it for personal enjoyment and the art then keep doing it. The Internet has a long history of randos blogging into the abyss.
Yup lol, that's pretty much what I am and expect to continue to be!
Totally agree. Video, especially "shorts" a-la TikTok and such are what audiences these days are looking for. For me personally though, I find that type of content so lacking anything of value.
I also don't know that I have the right personality for video content - short or long. I might give it a shot eventually, but for now I'll just continue blogging into the abyss, with the hope that I might help someone now and then.
Thanks for making this post, I've been hearing a lot of good things about DuckDuckGo and this made me finally switch over to it
Awesome! I honestly don't know why more people don't use it, or other open alternatives.
I keep hearing Bing mentioned on so many anti-Google threads, but since when is Microsoft any better than Google? Ethically anyway.
I think there will always be a place for small blogs
Cheers to that Bart! 😊
Wondering why not blog here, on dev.to. Is that not one of the prime purposes of the site? I mean I'd keep a solid backup of what you write as there's never any knowing when a site goes under but still.
Well, I enjoy having my own space that I can customize the way I want, so that's one thing.
But I also blog about things that wouldn't fit here, like the travel content for instance. So I run my main blog as my own little corner of the net, but then repost the tech content I think is more relevant to dev.to on dev.to, but not even all of the tech content since it's not all dev-related.
IndieWeb (own your own content)
I have heard from SEO gods that when you post the same article on two different platforms, then search engines can penalize your website because of duplicate content.
I just went to your website and found this very article there as well...
The writer has set something called the "canonical URL" which instructs Google that the content on their website is "the original" and this is merely a repost on a content aggregator. For this reason they will not get penalised (for duplicate content at least) 💗
GrahamTheDev is correct, I use the canonical URL to suggest to search engines that my original post lies somewhere else. Sometimes they accept the canonical, sometimes they don't. You can actually see the notice of that at the top of this post (dev.to displays a message for users to know this is a repost).
But you are correct that it is the exact same article, and If Google decides to penalize me for that, it will show up in my GSC (Google Search Console) and Google will alert me that my site doesn't own the original content.
In this case though, no obvious penalties, and no alerts have been issued, and all of my content is still showing as indexed and ranked by Google. Just not actually ranking well in the results, like with many other site owners.