@diane OMG!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Right, I will do a full post on this later in the week, but this is SEO in 2024
You will currently only rank in Google based on domain authority (even for most longtail keywords)
The only way a low authority site will rank in Google for a specific keyword is if there is no other information on that subject, potentially a keyword that may only be searched for 1-2 times per month (you'd be better off targeting a more broad and competitive term and seeing if you can rank on Bing)
If you lost traffic in August 2022, December 2022, March 2023, September 2023, or March 2024 (especially, if you lost over 50% of GOOGLE traffic) you have an algorithmic penaltly placed on your website,
If you lost traffic during an HCU you have a sitewide classifier on your website, hence the massive drop in traffic, YOU WILL NOT RANK FOR ANYTHING IN GOOGLE.
The "page-by-page classifier" was clearly JUST FOR LARGE WEBSITES ON MAY 5th (Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Outlook India all had certain subdomains either deindexed or they removed these themselves, and saw a massive drop in traffic from losing those articles, BUT, everything else on their website written by their own in-house editorial team still ranks, so to make up for lost money, what have they done? They now charge MORE money for PARASITE SEO)
If your website doesn't look like a real business (people are currently adding ecommerce platforms and tools to their websites in order to "look like a real business"<---Stephen Vickers (SEO Jesus) is doing a case study on a new site and adding Shopify to it to see what happens)
Google has repeatedly said over the years DON'T WRITE FOR SEARCH ENGINES, WRITE FOR PEOPLE
Guess what?
Doing longtail keyword research in order to RANK IN GOOGLE is "writing for search engines"
Basically, every website that has the MAJORITY of their content aimed at ranking in Google by writing articles around longtail keywords HAS BEEN HIT BY HCUs and CORE UPDATES
Parasite SEO (with backlinks) is working like a treat!!! (btw, Andy, if you read this, this is what we need to with your Linkedin WA review... I'm feeling geenrous, I might give it blast with 3,000 web 2.0 property keyword anchor text backlinks<--- high DA websites WON'T get penalized for crappy backlinks, their DA is too high and they "naturally" get 1,000s of backlinks every day. If I used the same backlinks on a "normal" WordPress website you'd get slapped by Google)
As I say, I'll write up all my thoughts, but basically, if you're trying to rank a website WITHOUT DECENT AUTHORITY, if you DON'T LOOK LIKE A REAL BUSINESS (You need branded backlinks too) and come across as a straight ad revenue or affiliate marketing site, and if you're targeting longtail keywords ON YOUR WEBSITE to rank in Google, if you HAVEN'T ALREADY BEEN, you're gonna get slapped soon!!