Just read this over at SEORT about Google flipping the rankings during Thanksgiving. Honestly, it just feels disrespectful at this point. You put in real work, try to make something useful, and then some random weekend update wipes out what you’ve built… while their engineers are at home eating pie.
The funniest part is how everyone pretends they “see a pattern.” Nobody has a clue. They guess. They squint at charts. Some guy on X says “my fishing blog dropped 80%” and suddenly it’s a theory. SEO has become weather forecasting with more anxiety.
And Google talks about “helpful content,” like they’re some wise librarian. But they keep rewarding junk. Not even creative junk. Just recycled, boring stuff that exists to catch keywords. If that’s what they really want, why not just admit the game?
Or maybe their game is up.
What annoys me most is how unstable it’s become. You can’t treat this like a business if your “business partner” keeps changing the rules at midnight on a holiday. It’s like trying to build a house on a trampoline.
Maybe the lesson isn’t to make better content. Maybe the lesson is: don’t trust Google to care about your effort. Build for yourself first, and let Google be whatever mess it wants to be.
I feel your pain there Luis! Sounds like you’ve been Google slapped. It seems like a lot of internet marketers will not be giving thanks to Google this weekend!
I do sometimes think back to when building a website was a reasonably solid investment of time and money, but these days … you might as well do parasite SEO
Totally off-topic, but in the comments of that article from Round Table, I sawthis linkabout Amazon adopting AI ‘aggressively’ … bit scary!
That being said, I don’t think it’s just Google. My Pinterest traffic has gone down since the 24th, I guess it would be normal on Thanksgiving and the day before Thanksgiving, because everyone in the US is at the dining table. I hope it will get back up.
Lizzy
Yeah, my pinterest traffic is down too. I was looking over my stats last night, and was wondering why we were so low, and the remembered I had just gone to Thanksgiving dinner the day prior
By the way Andy, did you reapply for Journey yet with your new fitness site and did you manage? I asked them if I can reapply for my Africa site, as I reached over 2k followers there and the country has mostly changed to the US now and some UK.
But first, I think I should probably delete low quality old blog posts (that I wrote back then when I was on WA, ‘roundup reviews’ and such, ugh), and update a lot of them. They are really looking for quality content now , aren’t they?
Also, it seems that chatGPT is writing more ‘humanlike’ now, although with the new version, it seems to hallucinate more, don’t you think?
I’m not convinced that Google is “destroying” the web on purpose, as some comments on that RT post seem to be suggesting. My take is they’re just trying to catch up with AI and ended up breaking things along the way. I think that’s actually more likely.
I see the same thing on social. Instagram and TikTok both overcorrect every time a new trend or feature takes off, and in the process, they mess with the whole ecosystem. Google’s doing the same but with search. They’re chasing “the next thing” instead of protecting what made their product useful in the first place.
I’ll still invest in SEO, but will also use things that I can control more - an email list, a local reputation, real relationships. Tools and algorithms will keep changing, but people remembering your brand doesn’t.
Hey Lizzy … yes I’ve noticed the content quality with 5.1 is a lot better. I mentioned elsewhere that I’ve thinned down my bloated review prompt and it’s spitting out ‘publish quality’ reviews with almost no editing needed now. Pretty cool.
Also noticed more hallucinations too. It returned a completely made up set of ‘facts’ yesterday and I had to tell it how terrible the resposne was and how it wasted my time. My wife is getting a little concerned that I am treating Chatty too much like a human! Like it’s my little buddy!
Hey Luis … I don’t think they would intentionally do that but there’s definitely some ‘unexpected consequences’ going on. Problem is the shareholders demand continuous increases in profits. Otherwise the share price goes down. Maybe the big G can see the writing on the wall and are just cashing in as best they can before AI removes the need for Google to exist.
Lol Rohan, I’m doing the same with chatGPT, but thats actually good for new blog posts, he writes them in my tone now hahaha.
And sure, I’ll just have Chat rewrite my old posts, and delete the entire previous text, that’s a ‘fresh content’ to Google as well, and really so much better than before. (Google is still very volatile to me, a roller coaster)
In the meantime, I’m back on Facebook, have to ugh.
What are you up to? Trying Pinterest?
I’m actually getting some professional help with Pinterest and things are starting to move a little. Still trying to find some time to update my old WA site … Chatty has given me the marketing plan. Just need to execute.
That’s more of a longer term project but in the meantime, I’m still heavily into the parasite SEO. Testing out new platforms, building mini topic clusters on parasite hosts and trying to fly under the radar. One of these days I’ll publish a little guide on my progress with parasite SEO.
… and I did fall for the SEO Neo black friday deal so I have 3 months to test that bad boy out. I only tested the very feature limited free trial version previously (and that was powerful). So I’m excited to see what the full version can do. If my VPS provider would just set up my account already!
So yeah … If Neo is as good as it’s made out to be then I may be offering some backlink services here soon
No, I need to see how I can reapply - my traffic went back down below 1K since I didn’t continue with the fitness site (need to see where it is at currently). Well, I need to figure out what I want to do with it in general. lol.
