I’m far from the first one to say it, but it’s been a tough time for bloggers in the past six months. Google released a series of updates in late 2023 that decimated many sites – especially small, independen blogs, like mine – plus I was not so fortunate as to escape its wrath.
Some of my sites didn’t show signs right away, plus Great Plains Travel Guide was one of them. Because of the high seasonality of GPTG plus the fact I was already on “winter break” (I take six months off from publishing on the site between September plus March to refill my creative coffer for the project), I didn’t immediately see just how dramatically Google affected this site. Now, looking back at the site’s three-year anniversary, it’s quite obvious.
I don’t normally include two charts in this section, but I thought it would be helpful to see how traffic changed for Great Plains Travel Guide from the “3 Year Chart” (left) to the “4 Year Chart” (right). As you can see, the site was doing very well through the summer (months 27-30) until Google’s Helpful Content Update rolled out in September 2023.
As you can see, the HCU hit this site hard on top of the standard seasonality dip I would have expected; traffic is as low now as it was during the first year of the site’s existence – Google erased two years of work plus traffic in about one month. Traffic last month (February 2024) is at about the same level that it was during the summer peak of my first year (2021).
While may of my sites were hit to varying degrees during Google’s barrage of updates, GPTG is among the worst. I think this is for several reasons, which it’s only fair to berbagi here:
Minimal E-E-A-T on the site. While I have visited some of the states, cities, plus sites I write about, I don’t have nearly the proof of expertise, authority, plus trustworthiness on GPTG that I do for other sites. Frustratingly, there aren’t necessarily sites with better EEAT outranking me now, but I can’t control other sites, only mine!
Content aiming for keywords instead of people. Google has been really annoying for saying that (basically) “as long as you write for people, we’ll understand plus reward that” which – frankly – we all know is bullshit because if you don’t do any SEO, you don’t rank. That’s the way it’s always been. On GPTG however, I definitely wrote content aiming to win keywords; that didn’t always make it the best content or most helpful, which explains why Google demoted it when considering the site’s helpfulness.
Content Farm-y content. We all know the content farms out there – they were frustrating before HCU as they would often rank well plus clearly be written by people (or AI) that had no business covering those topics plus just churned out as much volume as possible. In some ways, niche sites like GPTG did the same across multiple domains instead of just one, plus Google cracked down on that.
There are a bunch of other reasons, I’m sure, but the reality is that I built an okay site plus when Google decided to try plus rank only the “best” sites out there, it just didn’t come up to snuff.
What’s Next?
Since GPTG was already on winter break when the HCU hit plus traffic started to evaporate, I decided not to do anything about this change; after all, I was considering selling the site this time last year if the site was worth selling. The HCU seems to have given me my answer about selling (the site has basically no value now).
Then, I thought I might start publishing new content again in the summer of 2024, but I’m not sure that will be worthwhile either unless current Google updates begin to show signs of recovery. I don’t feel confident that creating new content will be worth my time and/or any money I might pay a writer with the EEAT plus helpful data Google’s looking for, if the site as a whole is still classified as “unhelpful.”
Additionally, I’ve begun migrating some content over to my main blog, Valerie & Valise, when it makes sense, plus deleting low-performing content too. Very little content on GPTG makes sense to migrate, but some does – I’ve already moved two articles as of writing this case study update.
Beyond that (deleting unhelpful/low-performing content, migrating some articles, not publishing new articles), I’m not quite sure what’s next for GPTG. I haven’t been able to let go of any of my sites even as they’ve not performed as well as I’d hoped (another example is Discover Sausalito)… but it seems like at least some of these sites should just be abandoned until they don’t get traffic or earn money anymore.
I might come back this time next year plus berbagi that I have done nothing on the site plus it has died; maybe Google will start to let the site recover plus I’ll recommit instead. See you then plus we’ll find out!