Here you are in the midst of another “Google update”. It gets tedious, especially for Website publishers who only see their traffic trending downward. You inevitably wonder when it will ever end or if this SEO stuff is worth the wait.
I can’t answer that last question for you. Every year there are small and medium business owners who give up on search engine optimization specialists. We’re an industry that refuses to adopt professional standards, so you have no idea of what to expect from the SEO expert who shares advice or offers to help your business grow. The lack of SEO standards doesn’t simply put you in the bad position of having to blindly choose your next SEO expert – it impedes real growth for the SEO industry and its client bases as a whole.
SEO standards won’t prevent people from wasting their time on nonsense analysis and high-risk strategies. But having real industry standards would give SEO employers and customers some leverage to work with. You should always ask your SEO specialists to support an initiative to develop a real standards committee. You’ll know they understand the need if they do NOT talk about “ethics”.
Now the reason why I started this article with yet another rant about the lack of SEO standards is that this is why you see so many nonsensical analyses of Google updates. Inevitably some SEO blogger trots out one or more charts showing how certain Websites are “losers” (or “winners”), or how they haven’t recovered from past updates, or something scary like that.
Every Website Has An Analytics Story
There are most certainly Website publishers who are struggling to rebuild the search referral traffic to their sites. The problem is, they’re not sharing their analytics data with the world. And if you’ve lost Google traffic you’re under no obligation to do that, either. In fact, merely showing that your site has lost traffic only tells part of the story.
Was that traffic converting into real business to you? That’s an important question. Generally if a Website loses 80% of its search referral traffic it loses a significant amount of revenue, too. But if it isn’t an 80% drop in revenue then you’re looking at the wrong metrics. Traffic isn’t your problem. Qualified, converting traffic is what you need to be concerned with.
There’s a difference between an affiliate or made-for-advertising site trying to bring in random search traffic and a typical small business site trying to sell someone else’s products (or their own unknown products). Competing in non-branded search is very different from competing in branded search.
When SEO industry gurus toss out these (usually uncredited) charts demonstrating apocalyptic chaos in someone else’s traffic, they’re only sensationalizing F(ear) U(ncertainty) and D(ismay) content. They’re not doing you any favors by frightening you with F.U.D. Your Website analytics story isn’t about fear – it’s about growth or the lack of it.
Those Scary Charts are Unreliable
There are two kinds of F.U.D. charts that SEO gurus love to share with the world: third-party (SEO tool) guestimates or anonymized “client” analytics data.
The 3rd-party SEO tool industry thrives on estimating traffic and keyword analysis. Their data is all the SEO specialist has for “competitive research”. But it’s not representative of what’s actually happening on a specific Website. You can compare these tools’ estimates to your own analytics data and see significant differences between what they think you’re receiving for traffic and what you’re actually receiving for traffic.
And if you’re wondering whether it’s that bad for other sites, it is. I’ve made many comparisons for both myself and my clients. People eventually learn to take these numbers with great skepticism.
Either way, the bottom line is that these charts aren’t showing you anything relevant to your Website’s traffic. Sure, it’s nice to feel like you’re not alone in your pain, but trend lines in analytics charts (real or estimated) that have nothing to do with your Website don’t tell you anything useful.
The SEO expert who pretends these charts are meaningful is either an incompetent idiot or a ripoff artist. Sometimes it’s both. Even if they disclaim the charts in some way, they’re still playing the F.U.D. game with you.
Google Updates Its System Every Day
Website traffic can be affected by many different things. The most common major causes of changes in search referral traffic include:
- Changing how often you publish or update content
- Changing the kind of content you publish
- Changing your Website (navigation, page design, link attributes, etc.)
- Acquiring links (and NOT acquiring links)
- Changes in what Google has in its index
- Changes in what Google decides to show in its search results
- Change in how Google ranks what is in its search results
- Changes your competitors make (to their sites, publishing, etc.)
When I see people express frustration with their Google search referral traffic on social media, and if their sites are easy to find, I’ll look at what they are doing currently versus what they did a year ago (or before the last update they’re blaming for lost traffic).
About half the time I find obvious self-inflicted harm. And most site owners (who don’t know me) generally become defensive and insist the changes they made couldn’t be that significant. Or maybe they follow some SEO expert who said they should do those things.
The problem for you and every Website publisher is that no SEO blogger no matter how experienced or knowledgeable or reputable has to live with the consequences of the changes you make to your site. We can’t provide you with the cover to justify those decisions. At best we can share case studies explaining what we did for some other Website and what happened next.
At worst we offer unscientific explanations and rationalizations for what are really stupid, unnecessary, or harmful SEO practices.
3 Questions You Should Ask Yourself
When you “lose” Google search referral traffic, you should do a sanity check before concluding you were harmed by a Google update. Too often I see Google announce an update on Wednesday and by Thursday morning people are moaning and groaning about how the update has killed their traffic. That’s typically not how it works. It takes time for these massive algorithmic changes to roll out to all the data centers and begin affecting the indexes.
Q: Did I change anything about my Website in the last 3 months?
Q: Am I looking at Google Search Console data, Website analytics data, or a 3rd-party SEO tool?
Q: Am I overlooking seasonal traffic changes or other non-search causes of traffic changes?
I’ve lost count of how many times someone told me “yes, I changed my Website but it was nothing significant.” That nothing signifiant often includes major, radical changes like:
- Deleting massive volumes of content
- Adding “rel=’nofollow'” to internal links
- Adding “noindex” directives to major arteries (categories, etc.)
- Blocking sections of sites in “robots.txt” from being crawled
- Removing important URLs from navigation
Those are just a few examples. I’ve seen people rewrite entire Websites and say they changed nothing. Or they dropped whole product lines, vendor inventories, or otherwise shifted their business model away from traffic-generating value. Sometimes you’re required to do this by your business contracts. But don’t assume you should maintain the same volume of search referral traffic you had before when you do these things.
It’s insane just how insignificant people think world-shattering events can be.
If It’s Not You, It Could Be Google, But …
The next thing I ask people about is whether their competitors have made major changes to their sites recently. Search engine systems reward content through those magical ranking signals. So maybe the other guys are just outscoring you with their latest changes.
And, sure, they could be buying a lot of links. But a common fallacy with link-based SEO strategies is assuming that you only buy helpful links. In fact, many people waste a lot of time disavowing “spammy” links that aren’t causing any problems while continuing to buy links that violate search engine guidelines.
How can “spammy” links not cause problems? You probably only think they’re “spammy” because some 3rd-party SEO tool tells you they are spammy. That’s not how it works. Bing and Google don’t use the same methods these tools use to identify probable spam.
In fact, the links Bing and Google object to the most are the links you’re buying. Their efforts are directed at detecting and nullifying those paid links.
Maybe you’re buying links that help. Maybe you’re being ripped off. Either way, understand and accept that you are gambling, not optimizing for search. Real optimization complies with search engine guidelines because its goal is to improve the relationship between the Website and the search engines.
So maybe the competition is buying better links than you are. Or maybe the links you’re buying aren’t working the way you think they should be. I’ve also lost count of the number of times I’ve seen some Googler (who has access to an internal tool that tells them what is going on) say to some frustrated Website owner “your links aren’t helping you as much as you think they are.”
I’d leave the “spammy” links the frightening SEO tools are sounding alarm klaxons about alone and concentrate on earning more links rather than buying them. Sure, link anchor text can be helpful if it’s passed to your site, but it’s also going to be UNhelpful once the search engine algorithms figure out why the link exists.
It Could Also Be A Manual Action (i.e., “a penalty”)
Google can cause your site to lose search referral traffic algorithmically (“not a penalty”) or manually (“a penalty”). The algorithmic non-penalty is near impossible to detect. Yes, SEO experts make best guesses based on their past experience and they are sometimes right. But the manual action notice is easy to find in your Google Search Console account.
And if there is a manual action notice then you were not hit by a Google update. Website penalties are sometimes handed out en masse in conjunction with major algorithmic updates.
Don’t blame the algorithm for your manual action notice. Blame yourself for violating whatever guidelines you were caught breaking.
So You’re Sure It’s REALLY The Google Update
Okay, you’ve ruled out all of the above and you’re reading the latest SEO blog posts about Google’s Helpful Content System (or whatever). Sooner or later you’re going to be disagreeing with Google.
- Your content is manually written (by experts – certified, qualified, degreed, doctrinated experts)
- Your content is truly helpful
- Your content is yadayadayada
They get that from nearly everyone.
Arguing with Google about how many customer testimonials you have isn’t going to change anything. Either you’re lying to yourself about the quality of your content OR you’re in a heap of trouble.
Frankly, I’d rather be the person lying to myself about the quality of my content. That can be fixed. It might take time. It may cost money. It may be painful. But you can always improve the quality of a poorly made Website.
The other problem isn’t so easily fixed. Google’s algorithms are designed to favor certain kinds of Websites. It’s not always obvious. They don’t always disclose what they are doing. But with their heavy emphasis on machine learning they’re almost certain running hundreds of selection and/or ranking algorithms that are trained to look for certain patterns in data (“signals”).
What the SEO experts don’t yet understand is that nailing the individual signals isn’t always enough. Your site has to meet pattern-trained expectations. To a machine learning system a data pattern may include hundreds or thousands of tiny, obscure data points.
What Happened to the Search Results?
As I write this article in March 2024, Google has changed a huge number of search results by artificially pushing up (mostly incomplete or irrelevant or blatantly wrong) content from Websites like Quora and Reddit. The quality of Google’s search results has declined significantly since they started doing this.
So why did they do that?
Because over a span of a couple of years a lot of popular technical news sites rans stories about how awful Google’s search results were – how they were so bad that searchers often appended their queries with “+reddit” or “+quora”. And when Bing blew past Google in early 2023 with AI-enhanced search results Google CEO Sundar Pichai went into panic mode and threw out the playbook for designing good, effective search results.
Bing used to be a pretty decent search engine. Not so much any more. I can no longer trust the answers they provide to my questions because they’re amalgamating content from multiple sites. That is, their AI-enhanced results are pasting together complete bullshit for many questions.
Google apparently wants to follow in Bing’s footsteps with their Search Generative Experience. Fortunately for Google’s users, almost no one outside the SEO community knows or cares about Google’s SGE experiment. According to those unreliable 3rd-party SEO tools the Google Labs site receives fewer than 20,000 visits per month. I don’t know how much traffic SGE really gets, but I do know that it’s so little it’s barely within the parameters of the data the SEO tools use to build their estimates.
The real problem with Google search results for users (at the present time) is that Google (as a search engine) has run off the rails. It’s trying to become something other than a search engine – mostly an advertising platform, in my opinion. About 40% of Google users currently use ad blocking extensions in their browsers (if yet more 3rd-party tools are to be believed). Instead of improving the quality of their advertising experience for users, Google’s response over the years has been to shove more ads into the pages of both their search results and their advertising partners.
Reflective Dynamics operates a portfolio of passive income Websites. We’ve been turning down the volume on our AdSense sites’ advertising load because the system crowds so many ads into the pages it creates an awful experience. And we’re giving serious consideration to dropping out of AdSense altogether. It’s a nightmare to manage these sites according to their vague, almost anonymous demands. You might be running ads on a 1,000-page Website and AdSense will suddenly notify you that you’re violating their guidelines. It’s probably a single word on a single page but their notification won’t tell you which page.
Add to that what appears to be declining search traffic overall as people jump over to other platforms (Bing and its search network including DuckDuckGo, or YouTube, or TikTok) and Google has to work harder every quarter to increase its advertising revenues. The quality of the Google search experience has been a train wreck for years and it will probably only get worse until new leadership arrives at the company.
But we’re assuming Google’s owners/investors still want the company to be a search engine. Maybe their vision is different from what it was 20 years ago, when everyone saw Google as a resource for sending traffic to the rest of the World Wide Web.
Conclusion
If your Website is in one of a growing number of categories (or “niches”) where Google is leveraging its own content to compete with you directly, you may never be able to “recover” your lost search referral traffic. Revisiting all the Helpful Content System tips just won’t help.
Many SEO bloggers are sounding alarm klaxons now over Google’s SGE. I seriously doubt it’s ever going to be more than an experiment. A few random experiments have now been seen in the wild, but Google historically runs these experiments for years. And many of its Labs projects never became full SERP features.
The greater threat, in my opinion, is Google’s Gemini. This is their AI-powered chat platform (for lack of a better description). The Search Generative Experience now uses Gemini to enhance its search results. But based on Google’s own Trends data (as well as those pesky 3rd-party SEO tool estimates), it appears that users are more interested in using Gemini directly by a factor of about 100-to-1 (compared to Labs/SGE).
Gemini doesn’t search the Web (yet – at least not the free version). But I suspect that day is coming.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
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Natural Backlink Profile: Endless Ways to Build One
Website Not On Google? Why Some Internal Pages Aren't Indexed
RankBrain and Neural Matching: What Is the Difference?
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