I feel bad but it seems like the only thing that gets attention in these updates is Google algo updates.
They are coming out with such speed, and having such an impact on the website industry that it is impossible to keep up.
I’m “pleased” to report that overall, there has been no further decline, or a least minimal decline in traffic and rankings since the major impact of the September update, but there is now ANOTHER update currently rolling out so we will see what impact that has.
In the following sections, I will go into more detail about the change in traffic and revenue numbers (not too significant thankfully), and plans going forward.
Site Recap
The site is in the ‘Entertainment’ niche – established in January 2021. Monetized with Ezoic advertising.
Approx 350k words of content over 300+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here.
October Statistics
I’m confident that the full effect of the most recent update has been fully integrated.
The dip experienced during September:
This follow-up chart from October shows a lot more stability. You could say there is a very gentle downward trend in impressions and clicks, and I would not argue with that, but overall the traffic was stable.
What is interesting to note between September and October is that there was a very significant decrease in traffic and impressions, but a barely noticeable decrease in revenue. Ad revenue did dip slightly, but that dip was countered by a bigger-than-average month of affiliate revenue (remember we are talking very little dollar amounts overall though…).
Even ignoring the affiliate revenue, the dip in Ads revenue, without the EPMV changing much, suggests that a lot of the traffic that I lost, was for low-value pages, from a revenue standpoint. This could be a lot of the pages that were created based on User Generated Content that was ranking in the SERPS, that I had decided to write posts for.
Given a huge part of the recent SERP changes was a revitalization of User Generated Content in the SERPS, this could explain the change.
Whether this hypothesis turns out to be an accurate depiction of the underlying causality, I’m glad that my most profitable pages have maintained most of their earning power.
I’m glad to have access to Ezoic data sources to be able to hone in on the specific pages that have been gained/lost and also see how my EPMV is trending in comparison to other site owners and niches etc.
November Activity
If I am honest, I’m still unsure what direction to go with this site given the changes in this ‘niche site’ space. The business model and content approach seem to be unsustainable. When I say unsustainable I mean that it seems like it is unlikely to be profitable going forward.
The ‘old days’ of posting decent quality content based on long tail keywords seems like an insufficient standalone strategy, and maybe it never was.
What I know for sure that that just pumping out a large quantity of content isn’t going to cut it. Google has made it clear that they are going to bias large publishers, regardless of their specific expertise.
So I’m putting a lot of thought into what I can do with this site, and with the content that is unique. How can I separate myself out from the crowd, with useful content, that users engage with and find useful?
At the end of the day, Google does want to serve people with the most relevant and useful content, so that needs to be my focus going forward.
I’ll continue to focus on updating the content that is ranking, to try and preserve my (very small) ‘moat’ on some of the pages that are ranking – but keep listening to the words from Google about what they are prioritizing and why. There is another update rolling out now, so I might get a surprise recovery in some way – but I am not banking on it.
