Okay, I really need to get something of my chest. It’s not even 8am and in the past 3 hours since waking up I already got bombarded by people complaining about and hating on Google. Most of them got impacted by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and/or the March 2024 core algorithm update.
And to be very honest upfront, yes, I have seen the impact of the many updates in my own portfolio and income too. Even websites that have about the same positions as they used to now end up having lower traffic numbers.
But the amount of complaining about how unfair the world is, with Google being the evil overlord of course, that’s not helping anyone. Some people go to the lengths of spreading conspiracy theories, which might or might not come true in the future.
And other people, like the video below, start spreading content about how Google is ruining their lives.
I understand the concerns, when you’re the sole income then having it impacted by something out of your control sucks. Especially when Google communicates one thing in the guidelines and feedback, while doing the opposite in the actual search results. With a total lack of transparency about what is really going on.
Even the repeated messages about how sites can recover from being hit by the helpful content update, without providing practical help on how and without any evidence that websites are actually recovering are adding only fuel to the fire.
Having your income at risk, for some websites even firing their team of writers, that is a very real issue. No matter the reason. And the timing, with cost-of-living spiralling out of control almost everywhere in the world only exacerbates it.
Honestly, I personally couldn’t get much work done during the March core update, simply because I was completely lost for direction. Not knowing whether to go left or right, with the communication from Google not providing guidance and seeing websites all over the globe getting hammered. So yes, I felt lost, helpless and a bit frustrated too.
Living as Digital Nomad, seeing my income being lower than last year and “get a job” not being a real solution providing that I don’t live in one place/country and are not allowed to work locally while on a tourist visa. I can even admit that I feared for the future at some days.
However, I do wonder if the people mentioned earlier really know what it means to be an entrepreneur? Did they really expect life to be easy without the boat getting rocked all the time? Did they expect Google to provide them with traffic simply because they think their content is the best and helpful?
I’m not saying their content is not helpful, or that the websites that replaced them in the search results provide better content. Also, helpful or not is a very subjective label to put on something, not only is it different from person to person but also the situation can change what is helpful.
For example, when I’m building a website and running into an issue with a plugin. Then I want concise quick on the spot answers. Instead, Google showed me YouTube videos of 30-45 minutes where the first 5 minutes were nothing other than babbling around.
I ain’t got time for that…
I also did not have time to read articles with thousands of words hoping that the issue, with a solution, would actually be in there somewhere.
So, I ended up adding reddit to the search query, found a topic with my problem as the title and a working solution inside. Quick, easy, on the spot and problem solved.
In many other circumstances, like getting to know the plugin as a beginner, the extensive videos and articles might be helpful. But it’s all not helpful when I want to solve a problem without wasting hours on content that I’m not even sure of will actually help me.
Time is limited you know…
In the end, helpful or not is very much in the eye of the searcher and can be very different every single time. Making it one of the most useless and subjective metrics for content quality too, even more when you see content of (very obviously) lower quality rank in place of your website.
It happens, there are a lot of websites that were providing genuinely good content. That were written by real people, with real experience and are now outranked by big brand names that have copywriters do the job, without any of the experience.
More importantly, without any explanation of why this is happening too.
It would suit Google to be more honest, to open up about them also not 100% knowing what the algorithm is doing these days. It’s what happens when you add AI to an algorithm, you lose partial sight of what is going on inside and why. Since it’s clear that the latest updates have at some points gone too far.
It would also suit all niche site owners and bloggers to understand that the algorithm is just a computer processing 1s and 0s. It’s not a human being that is capable of understanding the difference between real experience and helpful content, and crap written by an underpaid copywriter, or God forbid, written by AI.
I, personally, think it would also help if everyone learned to understand that SEO has always been changing. It has always been a dance between Google, people who were trying to follow the rules, and people trying to rank by exploiting loopholes. Where the latter got a big hammer to use with the launch of chatGPT and AI-content generators.
Some time ago Lily Ray, one of the few public SEO’s that I think is worth follow, shared the video below. Where she explains that it makes no sense for Google to have hundreds of websites with pretty much the same information being indexed and ranking.
Let’s be honest, to do all that uses a lot of processing power and server capacity. With all those new websites providing almost no value that did not already exist. Server capacity that Google now probably needs for SGE, or AI overview as they’re calling it these days. Which is garbage of its own right by the way.
Trying to make an end to this rant makes me think of the opening of The Lord of the Rings movies:
“The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”
The same now goes for SEO, for niche sites and for the Google search results. Things have changed, take a look at the search results and it is all very obvious. But hating on Google, on competition, spreading conspiracy theories or making dramatic videos about how a big company is ruining your life… that doesn’t make things better in any way.
Without denying that it sucks when you get hit, when you lose traffic, and with that lose a chunk (or all) of your income as well. When these times come, a real entrepreneur would take this as a chance to stand up and fight, to look for opportunities in the forest of change.
For now, I’m done with all this, in a following article I will come up with examples of where I think things are not as helpful as the creator thinks it is. Until then I’m going offline and focus on the things in life and business that I can control, without complaining.
