Hear the story of how a Google algorithm update wiped out a thriving affiliate marketing business overnight.
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imagine making $20,000 a month from your passion project and then out of nowhere Google wipes it all away my traffic to the website has plummeted 90 to 95% this is Jake fer The Mastermind behind that fifth front a site for honest Fitness Gear reviews Jake didn’t just lose 80% of his Revenue everything he poured his passion into day after day was completely shattered I want to build training and shoe content but not knowing what got me into this place in the first place to where I can’t even run my business it’s very frustrating this nightmare situation isn’t rare it’s taking down businesses left and right but Jake isn’t backing down so I’m stepping in to uncover the truth give him steps to recover and hopefully watch his business bounce back but first I needed to find out if he’s the real deal let’s go tight tight tight yes bring it through good this will be our nice like precursor warmup set precursor I thought this was the end nice are we going to make me look like I’m stronger than I am it’s the purpose of this video don’t know if this is going up Jake it is you got it yeah let’s go that was great having spent a day with Jake it was clear that he’s the fitness expert he claims to be it was time to uncover the truth of what really went down it looks like at your Peak you were actually at 167 you’re basically down here we have you down at around 18800 when you look at this graph like how similar would you say that this looks to search console or Google analytics very similar HF site Explorer shows you traffic estimations for any website and it’s invaluable in diagnosing why traffic drops occurred you stared to get drop off in September there was The Helpful content update the October core updates by the March 2024 core update you took a nose dive down here when significant traffic drops line up with a Google algorithm update it gives you a starting point to zero in on the potential cause I know how important this is because Google has crushed one of my sites too but the time that I got hit was in 2012 and that was at the time of the penguin update I should have been hit cuz I was buying links like crazy backlinks are hyperlinks from one page to another and Google treats them like votes to understand a Page’s importance but getting them isn’t easy that’s why tons of people resort to buying them which they don’t like when I got hit so did a whole bunch of other people who weren’t buying links who weren’t doing things that they shouldn’t have been doing like according to Google spam policies now it feels like history is repeating but this time they’re overcompensating for something new since chat GPT there’s been a lot of spam you know anyone can create thousands and thousands of pages like like this right to combat this Google went on the offense cracking down on spammy AI driven sites I don’t think that they can actually just hit the bad ones and so naturally there’s going to be good ones like yours that just kind of get in the way and you’re in the crossfire in your case you weren’t using mass generated AI content you weren’t doing anything wrong but you just got hit well it’s important to understand why Jake was hit the priority now is helping him recover his traffic and revenue what are your Revenue sources for the website mostly it’s affiliate driven and then also ads that means Jake earns a commission when someone buys products through his links but without traffic the money dries up and running a review site like Jake’s isn’t cheap last month I think I spent 3,700 on shoes alone Jake actually buys and tests every item he reviews something that sets him apart from many other affiliate sites this allows him to keep his reviews informative honest and unbiased and if it sucks I’m going to tell people before working full-time on a site Jake was a fitness editor at barbett writing over 2,000 articles and creating 300 videos his content has generated tons of traffic from Google and his expertise is also trusted across major Publications but now that he’s creating content under his own brand that fit friend Google doesn’t seem to be giving his content the same treatment despite his Relentless efforts to create in-depth and authentic content this has him in a dilemma do I keep producing written content at this point because if it’s landing on the third page when I’m the only written review for it like what is the actual point when I’m going more more in depth than even the product Ecom page despite Jake’s expertise for fitness shoes and experience writing content for search what he may have overlooked is one of the most basic and important fundamentals of search engine optimization you go in with heart and you say like I want to write the best post and I want to make sure that whoever comes and lands on this page finds the best shoes for them but what we forget is like what does that person really want and who is that person fortunately for Jake Google shows their cards right on the search results page we come here and we look at this and we we see products so somebody who’s searching for best gym shoes wants to buy something where do you see filters like this usually generally on like a normal product page or like a category page that’s right it also tells us something about optionality when people are searching for things like best gym shoes they want options why are we only seeing under 70 70 to 100 and over 100 it’s likely what people are spending the most on I guess yeah probably right and so now you’re starting to learn about who this Shopper is and what information you can provide to support their need but we look at this and we say why why is Google ranking this this page like my my content is way better like they’re only recommending this shoe and this shoe these are terrible shoes but that’s not necessarily what the Searcher wants let’s look at Rod repeat a shoe review site whose traffic has spiked just around the same time that Jake’s dropped and so when I land on this page the first thing that you see is this huge image we have a very short intro and then we have a quick summary of the entire post this block here is the intent of the Searcher more or less then the next thing they do is they qualify themselves it’s like high quality video of them actually testing shoes like I look at this and I’m like okay these guys are the real deal I’m like okay which ones okay how much is it oh yeah I do a lot of cardio okay 65 bucks that’s cheap all right 50% off okay oh bye boom they just made some money right and I’m satisfied with this Google is now finding out that okay the person clicked here they didn’t go back to the search results they stayed on the page they interacted with it they clicked links on it the Searcher was there for satisfied surfing search intent goes beyond content format much of it comes down to user experience there were a couple things I had to show Jake the first supported what we saw in the Ser optionality we come down here and this is where we start to see something interesting that they’ve done that you have not yet done where to buy from multiple places yeah Google product review guidelines says to consider including links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from The Merchant of choice most of Jake’s review pages that I saw only had one to two choices the second ux feature I showed Jake was something he had never seen before an affiliate site that gives an endtoend shopping experience they see the prices they see the colors they see whether it’s men’s or women’s you can choose the size and you can get all that inventory information which is done through apis from a user experience perspective that’s amazing for me like is that I just read about this stuff here and within that same experience I’m like I want this shoe and so I’m like okay well cool I am a 10 and A2 I can see which ones are available here I like the black ones but you know what I’d rather pay $120 instead of 224 well where do I buy that oh okay I I’d rather buy it from Nike so then I’ll go here Bing Bang Boom I just bought it and it’s done in many ways I like it when people stopped thinking about search cuz then they focus on these small micro nuances that don’t really move the needle but when you just focus on serving the intent of the Searcher you’re going to get more conversions and if Google does their job right you’re going to get more traffic I had a feeling Jake had some doubts on improving ux so I had to prove my point let’s take a look back at run repeat so this is September 2023 they went from 225,000 monthly visits I don’t know exactly what they did and I can’t attribute it all to that one little thing that I showed you there what did they do from in September 2023 to today that was so different from back here you can learn a lot of the stuff in page inspect using HFS page inspect we can see and compare changes that happened on a page much like the Wayback machine but with way more dates to choose from like you might go look and you say oh they changed their design well what in their design did they change why did they change that you see what’s different from from the December version Oh the table with the shoes yeah the Ecom thing everything from size to color to men’s women’s and all of a sudden we’re seeing that everything’s combined from the surf I feel like I could build a table that does way better and more depth than that after showing Jake the importance of user experience I had to share one tip with him that I thought would take his good content strategy to a great one how are you deciding like what content to create what’s relevant and what’s new in the industry I’ve been in it for so long I know which shoes are coming out which what people are looking for like a lot of my traffic now is just coming from my individual reviews for new shoes all of my listicles are gone out of search I think when you create any piece of content you can’t create for everyone cuz if you try and create content for everyone you end up creating content for No One create a separate one for best weightlifting shoes for advanced lifters or whatever that might be and you can always internally link to that one in your beginner one and to create that user experience Beyond just writing a block post arguably the biggest unfair Advantage Jake’s competitors have over him is huge resources and budget but Jake has his own unfair Advantage one he hasn’t realized yet you’re competing against some of the big brands that you know have lots of money behind them that are able to do stuff like this it makes it tough for you to compete in that kind of environment there’s one very clear advantage that I think you have which is your actual experience Jake was determined to work on impr improving user experience for his visitors but the big question was still left unanswered what are the next steps he should take to a full recovery if you’re trying to recover you need to look at the data and then come up with a reasonable hypothesis and then test one thing at a time when you implement things like don’t go crazy and just like you know invest all the money you have to like hiring this team and you know like people want to go crazy cuz they’re like oh like it makes sense now we don’t know how Google’s going to respond to these things right after the medic update in 2020 this site was on top of the world with with anything health related and then boom smashed little bit of recovery boom smashed and they’ve just never been able to recover they’ve hired SEO agencies and they were just never able to do it and I think that’s what it comes down to is you can’t put all your eggs in the Google basket 2 weeks after I spoke with Jake Google rolled out their August core update to promote genuinely useful content the result the site was hovering anywhere from like 6,000 to 7500 clicks a day and now we’re back at like 25 2,800 clicks even though he hasn’t fully recovered from this update his traffic and revenue are making a comeback but instead of excitement this experience has left him on guard despite doing nothing wrong but it’s not like a boom it’s all back to normal you know it’s a slow uptick and I’m fully expecting that and mentally I’m telling myself just assume that nothing is changing from the financial front with this AO update I still have it in my mind that I’m going to be doing exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 5 6 12 months almost after speaking with Jake it was clear there’s one massive thing Google lacked that would help small businesses Thrive when impacted by an algorithm update transparency I would love to still have clarity as to what parameters really dictate The Helpful content update other hcu sides are seeing a bit of a bounceback but I know a lot of good producers still aren’t I think the more we can have these fleshed out understandings of what they’re looking for it’s going to help content producers ERS build things that are more user driven while Jake’s site is on its way to recovery this story is far from over there are still many sites that had their traffic and revenue snatched away overnight like Jake but that doesn’t change the fact that SEO is still a powerful marketing strategy to grow your business just like it did for Jake and
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