Another month, another Google Search algorithm update.
I do not think I have seen so much drama, and such widespread website trafic reductions in years.
Google clearly had a plan of the type of sites they wanted to promote, and they went hard, leaving a lot of collateral damage in their wake.
Like so many other ‘niche’ sites, my traffic, and therefore revenue took a significant hit.
Im still working through the finer details of what traffic I lost, and why, and I will explore some of this throughthis income report.
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.
September Statistics
Though I am not sure if the update has fully rolled out (my sources sugest it is), you can see that mid-September, there was a significant drop (perhaps 50%) in both traffic and impressions.
Because this update only affected the site about half way through the month, the actual September statistics do not look as bad.
Page views were just under 9,000 down from around 12,000 – and impressions were down from 163,000 to 128,000.
From a revue pont of views, the reduction was commensurate with the traffic change, but ofset slightly by an increase in EPMV.
Ad revenue for the month, dropped down from $57 to $47, but EPMV was back over $8, which is not something significant to celebrate, but I will take any positive I can at the moment.
The (modest) monthly revenue for the site dropped from $67 down to $57.
Affiliate revenue through Amazon stayed the same, only bringin in enough dollars or a coffee ( a small black takeaway one….).
I only published 10 articles, because I was waiting to see the bigger impact of the previous algorythm update, and as I was waiting, we get this helpful content update. I think I will continue holding off from investing in significant content until the road ahead is clear in terms of what the future is for websites trying to monetize via ad revenue.
If I am completely honest, I cannot, hand on heart, claim to produce the best possible content on a the topics i write about. There is so much i could, and should do better. Which is what I will continue to do over the coming weeks and months.
October Activity
As alluded to above, I’m not planning any significant amounts of new content for this site for the time being.
I have started and will continue to look closer at which content continues to rank well, and which content has fallen away.
I will invest heavily in updating and improving existing content that ranks well with the hope to increase time on page and number of ranking keywords, but will continue some small, AI related experiments with regards to content in order to stay on the front line.
Stay safe out there!
