I’ll tell you what….
I am sick and tired of talking about Google Algorithm updates in these posts, but here we are again, talking about another one.
The month of October was going great, until late, then Google pushed out ANOTHEr update, which hit me reasonably hard this time.
I’ve been hit before and bounced back, so I expect this will be the same, but it is so annoying as I thought I was about to make some milestones this month, but not quite yet by the looks.
Outdoors Site
Monetization: Affiliate
Site Recap
Affiliate site, in the ‘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.
October Statistics
Rankings for different money pages were roughly the same. Some increased a bit, some decreased a bit. But not a huge change on last month overall.
This site took a small/medium hit from the update with impressions dropping to 319k (down from the highest ever last month of 463k), and page views were down by about 1000, to 13.4k.
The total income for this site took a big hit and came in at $378 and I can’t really pinpoint the cause. Ads income dropped, but that was because I decreased the number of ads on some of my high-traffic money pages. But affiliate earnings keep dropping, even though traffic and clicks are about the same. I suspect there are a few different causes at play, people not spending as much at the moment, and more competitors meaning cookies get displaced when they click on other affiliate links etc.
In reality, I acknowledge a lot of my content needs improving, but the quality doesn’t seem to counteract the continual decrease I am seeing in affiliate conversions. I’ll keep exploring the issue though.
November Activity
The main focus will continue to be renovating all of my money pages, building out the silos, and then optimizing the content using Market Muse.
I have about 10 more to go and plan to deactivate some of them as well because I just don’t think I have the expertise or authority to actually write well on those, and perhaps the CTR behavior is hurting me, not helping me.
Entertainment Site
Site Recap
Ads site, in the ‘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.
October Statistics
This site did seem to take a decent hit in the late-month Google update. Things were tracking well, and then there was a significant drop-off on the date the algorithm was rolled out.
Page views dipped from last month’s all-time high, down to 7916, but income from the Ezoic ads exceeded it’s previous all-time high again hitting $98.
Publishing was slow, with my writer only managing 4 articles, but this month will be a lot better.
The Q4 ad rates do seem to have increased, as indicated in the all-time high earnings, but im expecting revenue to drop next month given the algorithm update.
The other big update for this site was the addition of Amazon Affiliate links. The first few sales came through and look like it will bring in a modest amount per month. Though it is small, every little bit counts, especially when it is just monetizing existing traffic.
November Activity
I still have a lot more interlinking to do, but I want to try and understand why the traffic has dropped off, and which content took the hit.
Once I understand that I’ll be able to plan future content more.
So other than publishing more content, and interlinking, I’ll be trying to reverse-engineer the aspects of my site that got hit and see if there is anything I can do about it.
