Google has almost killed my site totally.

Until March I lost 50% of visitors which were stable for three years until September 2023, and since March 2024 update I lost 60% of what has left.
I lost another 15% today comparing to last Saturday.

It's a clear trend of ongoing obliteration of sites and I expect that in a month I will lost probably 99% of visitors, and probably be forced to shutdown site.

Can we keep this thread on topic. Again I get the pain, but reporting this is best in the monthly observations thread.
So,,,,

Rather, I'd encourage folks to make some objective contributions to help site owners reverse out of the existing mess and/or future proof their sites, perhaps self evaluating what they did that was sub par and what they will do to make things better.

For me, I just check GSC, and try to improve the pages that are crawled but not indexed. Means they have little value for customer (which most of the times are true), and check all the broken links we can have after running website for years. It’s maybe a common job for most of you, but it doesn’t hurt to use all the tools we have with the search engine.

Now, I mostly check the major keyword and use them on articles/pages that are built first for customers. Some can have little value for a crawler but high value for a customer. !

@Treud - Have you had any feedback from others to determine a perspective on your strategy to beef up the crawled pages other than this? eg UX/UI, content quality, content structure, internal linking etc etc

So at least one success, I have completely rebuilt my friend's store (new design, simplified menu structure, added an "About us" page and reworked images), result: sales are increasing, today even the highest since September, the ranking has generally improved, as has the traffic coming from Google. If this continues, he can breathe a sigh of relief.

@Micha - good to hear the "good news"

I suspect that UI/UX is an important component in the overall mix in the HCU updates and the current March core update.

On timing, when did you put these changes through?

Last Saturday, I honestly didn't think the change would make a difference so quickly. However, I guess you are right that UI/UX plays a very big role, as well as clear and easy to find information about the operator.

@Micha - I'm not the only one observing this theory. Did this site have excessive advertising or affiliate links on it before, or was it essentially clean, bar the UI/UX. what was it about the UX before that held it back? Also, what was the quality of the text / image content? (Just trying to get some perspective)
And a common thread on many sites impacted, including ones with content that may not be horrible, is a terrible user experience. In other words, the ad situation is severe on many of the sites, users are being bombarded with ads all over the page, auto-playing video follows you as you scroll down the page, and then you might be hit with popups as well. [gsqi.com...]

then:

Google updated its documentation in April of 2023 about page experience, and specifically included that information in its documentation about creating helpful content.

Yes, this might have been the warning about what the September HCU was going to target. With that update to the documentation, Google took the emphasis away from core web vitals and wanted site owners to focus on the user experience overall. You can clearly see in the questions that Google covers a wider range of REAL user experience issues, versus a core web vital score that might be a few milliseconds off.

The article references Google's documentation:

Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Site owners seeking to be successful with our systems should not focus on only one or two aspects of page experience. Instead, check if you're providing an overall great page experience across many aspects.

Self-assess your content's page experience
Answering yes to the following questions means you're probably on track in providing a good page experience:

Do your pages have good Core Web Vitals?
Are your pages served in a secure fashion?
Does your content display well on mobile devices?
Does your content avoid using an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Do your pages avoid using intrusive interstitials?
Is your page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page?
These questions don't encompass all page experience aspects to consider. However, questions like these, and consulting the following resources, may help you align with providing an overall good page experience.

[developers.google.com...]

I can't say for sure, but our sites had a substantial UI/UX upgrade and so for are holding and growing. (2x ccTLD's that did not add content value to the .com dropped to zero - so the UI/UX wasn't the only factor - I don't think G liked duplicate sites on a regional basis).

I think site owners should give thought to the signals user engagement sends back to G through Chrome. If a site is built for users, then folks will read the content and navigate around. Too many sites I've seen that have been hammered lack potential engagement signals. Better to write short content sometimes, not 1-2000 word "turns me off" articles (again a theory - needs more inputs from others).

[edited by: not2easy at 12:07 pm (utc) on Apr 18, 2024]
[edit reason] user request [/edit]

The website is a pure business, so no affiliate, no banner ads, nothing, it only sells food. But it was a very complicated menu with too many pointless subcategories. So I removed almost all subcategories and renamed many things so that it makes more sense and the customer can find a product much faster. I also integrated the contact options directly into the header.

As for the images, they all had a yellow tint in the background, which I removed so that the background of each image is white.

I haven't touched the product descriptions yet. I actually wanted to rewrite them, but since the ranking is currently increasing, I'd rather wait and see if the development is stable. The only text I've added is the "About Us" page, which describes the company's history, explains its environmental efforts and goes into other special features of the company.

But before anyone follows my example, a warning: I can't yet say whether the restructuring was successful or whether it's due to the ranking fluctuations we experience every day anyway. Therefore, you should only make changes very carefully at the moment and, if possible, wait until the Google update is complete.

@Micha - seems like you helped G to understand the semantic relationships around product + those UX improvements. My sense is that G sometimes struggles to understand what content is all about and therefore it's topical authority. It will be interesting to hear of the outcomes when you have done the product descriptions, if you want to share.

In the past I've had pages leap into the top 10, just with an additional paragraph of info. Not sure if that's still the case.

For my bylined articles, I've done two things:

1) Linked from the byline to an author bio page that clearly demonstrates my experience and expertise,

2) Added a mini-bio with photo after the main content.

In the AI age, these features may be reassuring to users, and what's good for users should (in theory) be valued by search engines.

I've also been adding schema markup to new and many existing evergreen pages.

Thought I'd add this useful post quote and tactic from @mhansen on another thread for referencing.

Conversely, a recipe site, which have seen their entire ecosystem decimated as well, gets 40 comments and 100's of shares per FB/Insta post. They do not link to their recipes on the FB posts but share just pictures and the basics of the finished product, then tell people to search for "brandname + recipe", or to DM for direct link. They're traffic from search exploded!

Basically, the ones I see staying the course and thriving today are in demand OUTSIDE of search, or in demand for things OTHER THAN just search generated traffic leading to revenue.

[webmasterworld.com...]

The key that I see is breaking out of Google dependence as they pile on the pressure to publishers and advertisers that they depend on, while their search product deteriorates. It's called the ensh*ttification : [doctorow.medium.com...] . Google has a lot of issues to manage and it's compounding fast and furiously with violent degradation for those caught in the crossfire of dependency IMO.

So shift the mindset of SEO and work with a priority of OUTSIDE first.

Go outside of the search process by building with tactics and improvements to future proof yourselves. This will position you for the next great innovation and challenger to Google's search dominance. Social is just one. More will come.

Focus on the value you offer and make it better. Being better isn't chasing Google's algo.

Customers and search will not stop, ever. The way Google does things are in for significant challenges that may impact you. So shift :)

Google: Sites Hit By The Old Helpful Content Update Can Recover & Grow

[seroundtable.com...]
Tracks some conversations with John Mu on recovery.

The current guidelines are too vague for business' that have had their revenues and motivation hammered. So I do hope that the team will mirror their sentiment and make things more explicit so that folks can work to restore some sanity into their lives. Markers in GSC would be good, but maybe I'm asking too much. Let's see.

One thing I would say, is that Google's continued bias/free pass to brands in this HCU update and overall ranking is flawed and not fair. There's plenty of good or better alternatives, and almost all only got to be a brand because Google let them in with prominent SE traffic and big Google ad spending budgets influencing brand awareness.

John [Mueller] said this on X, making it clear that he "can't make any promises" but he wrote, "the team working on this is explicitly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update." Then came this line, where he expresses his personal feelings about content creators who take "helpfulness to heart." He wrote, "It would be great to show more users the content that folks have worked hard on, and where sites have taken helpfulness to heart."

[seroundtable.com...]

I thought I’d resurrect and re pin this thread as Google is saying the existing August core update is going to restore some sites caught in the HCU update with improvements. This may take a month to settle and see.

Apart from 2 of our sites getting hit (ccTLD’s) I’m watching a crack team involved with a primarily finance information site (involving well known SEO’s ) that got hammered multiple times incrementally thru 2023, doing major content / URL cutting surgery,

I’ll be interested to see if their expertise and efforts are rewarded.

Hang tight.

@Whitey Thanks for the insightful observations and comments.

I think with AI becoming more and more smarter people are churning out content at an unprecedented scale. This put G in a spot as it just cannot index and rank every website. I assume this problem is only going to get worse.

I thought this interview by Aleyda Solis with Danny Sullivan shone a light on some positives to focus on. There’s a big emphasis in the conversation on making things useful:

[youtu.be...]

Some reports of uplift:

[seroundtable.com...]

The November core update is happening.

This update is about boosting genuinely valuable content and cutting back on posts that are just polished up for rankings.

[searchengineland.com...]

I totally agree with the need to focus on solutions and positive steps forward. It’s easy to get caught up in the frustration, but looking at what we can improve is key. Some “do’s” I’d recommend are: regularly auditing site content to ensure it’s high-quality and user-focused, keeping an eye on Core Web Vitals, and building a robust backlink strategy with relevant, authoritative sites. On the “do-not” side, avoid using black-hat tactics, like keyword stuffing or unnatural link building, and definitely steer clear of low-quality content. For future-proofing, I’m focusing on diversifying traffic sources and improving site speed and mobile experience. Let’s keep pushing forward and helping each other out!

@Whitey : pretty same consluions here, I mean on period from Sep 2023 to those days.