Throughout the month of June, I have continued to try and evaluate the impact of the May core update on our case study sites.
Even though the update has reportedly finished rolling out, I am still seeing some significant volatility in some of my highest-ranking pages and posts, so it doesn’t feel like it has been completed to me.
Overall, it seems like both sites have experienced a decrease in traffic and rankings, in the range of 10-20% but it is hard to distinguish between what is due to the update and what is seasonality and general market conditions.
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Outdoors Site
Monetization: affiliate
Site Recap
Affiliate site, in ‘Outdoors’ niche – established in June 2020. Approx 270k words of content over 200+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here. Built with this approach.
June Statistics
In June, the Affiliate Site saw very similar results in both traffic and monetization as May.
Total income for this site was almost identical to May, coming in at $723.
Likewise, traffic was also about the same, dipping ever so slightly to 12,896 page views.
The niche for this site is definitely in its off-season, but also has clearly taken a down ward step in the eyes of Google.
I have been analyzing some of the content, and also looking at keywords that each post is ranking for that aren’t covered well in the content, and plan to spend the new few months upgrading content.
June Activity
Throughout June there was no new content published, as I focused on optimizing existing posts.
I completed the 301 of the previous site that I mentioned last month. I created a new category to forward the previous domain to and the links have started to be picked up by search engines.
I’m not sure what impact this will have on rankings or traffic yet and look forward to seeing the potential impact over the next couple of months.
I have also been strategizing the best type of context tables and content boxes to use and looking forward to implementing some of these.
Entertainment Site
Site Recap
Ads site, in ‘Entertainment’ niche – established in January 2021. Monetized with Ezoic advertising.
Approx 220k words of content over 230+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here. Built with this approach.
June Statistics
June confirmed that this site was downgraded in the recent Google core update.
Page views dipped back down below 6k and income from the Ezoic ads was back down below $60 (just) as it was in April.
Though this is disappointing there is a lot I can do to improve this site in so many ways, so the onus is definitely on me to do some work that neds doing and see what we can do to turn this around.
On a promising note, the RPMs have been improving, so though they are still low (probably because of some of the issues discussed above), they are slowly going up and in the right direction.
June Activity
There were no new posts published in June.
I continued my focus on improving the quality of existing posts, but have some good stuff to publish in July!
