This is a story about a popular DIY blog that lost 75% of their traffic and income after a Google algorithm update hit their site. Learn how it all happened and what they’re doing now.
Charleston Crafted is a DIY and home renovation blog that built their audience using Google SEO. After getting some traction, they quickly realized how powerful Google traffic was as a traffic source.
They were getting hundreds of thousands of visitors every month and generating a multi-six figure income. But that all went away overnight after Google released the Helpful Content update.
Perhaps the most frustrating part is that Morgan and Sean had followed Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by the book, yet they still lost their traffic.
Watch the full video to get the full scoop.
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What actually Google is saying to them (and us) is…. "we finished training our AI with your content so hastalabye bye!"
AI Search is a plague
I use AI about 75% of the time for searching.
Let’s make it clear- Google updates kicked out her secondary websites that she developed as a traffic trap only without sincere interest in the subject. Her major website wasn’t affected.
Bravo Google! Kick fraudsters to the curb-side.
never rely on one thing only.
What about just getting rid of all affiliate crap in the website instead of moving first. Wait 3 months
Any business that is based on ad revenue for income is just one step away from complete failure. Unless your business is based on direct sales of advertising to business, then ad revenue should be a secondary source of income because you have no control over the revenue stream.
Google can drive traffic to different sites on a whim. YouTube can demonetize your channel or even remove it for violation of its terms of service or remove a large portion of your subscriber base after erroneously determining them to be "artificial". Affiliate sales also dry up if you aren't able to drive traffic to your website.
I am a small business owner too.. and IMO , they should have worked on diversifying their sources of traffic and not just relied on Google Search results.
We wish there was a search engine that was completely open source, powered by the People and not run by an evil company like Google. No ads, only the best attempt at providing the most relevant and helpful information to any user. Completely free.
Great motivation for me to never start a blog.
I feel bad for her but this was her mistake. Google owes her nothing. Google has updated the algorithm frequently over the years. Those updates make and break companies. That’s just the way it is. How do you address this? By diversifying your sources of traffic to reduce your dependence on any one source. Add paid, earned, and owned media from Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. When one of those sources drops off, your business suffers less because the other sources continue to perform.
And get ready for what’s coming: some people are shifting away from Google as their search engine, instead preferring to use large language models like ChatGPT. This is already happening. What to do about that? Start learning how to get these AI systems to promote your content.
The money is in your email list.
So…Google is garbage, is the lesson I learn from this video. Bing and Search GPT and AI search is the future.
…now imagine you’re in Afrika.
Is there have who can stand in front of Google Monopoly ? Answer is "NO" (Atleast for this Decade)
i am the only one who never listen google bullshit and do whatever it takes to rank a site? people still believe a single word from g team? damn. the purpose of algo updates are to increase theirs revenue, they dont give a fuck about any site on the internet.
People seem to miss a point. As far as Google cares, there are two types of site owners. The first are customers who pay to have their sites in the sponsored results. The other are people like those in the video, who got such good SEO, that they wouldn't consider paying to have their site in the sponsored results.
Which makes Google's reply "you've done nothing wrong" clear. It's an evasive way of saying there's nothing wrong in not paying Google to appear in a good position in the search results, but Google is going to make damn sure those who don't pay don't get the same results as those who do.
Well… I guess this video makes me feel better because it wasn’t just me. I’m just a solo operator and Google was my primary source of income. I’m down 71% on revenue.
Expensive lesson, but an important one on not depending so heavily on any one marketing channel.
google themselves are screwed, I little traffic they have left will be AI responses.
I don't want to seem crass here, but everyone knew that AI search was coming and that AI will take over information search over blogs eventually, but no one pivoted their business model. Youtube videos get top billing over text blogs and they sit to the right of the AI search results. For those that pivoted to a multiplatform model get top results now. Learn how to work the new model or stay invisible.
For people that work in the tech industry they describe their jobs as "In perpetual tutorial mode" In general it seems that every 6 months is a reset. The lady in the video said they worked 10 years to get to this point, but they're using a business model that was relevant 10 years ago, not today. She should have been spending 10 years upgrading her business plan to stay relevant instead of being complacent.
That’s why we should stop using their products that’s the best way to make them suffer switch to bing and rumble and Netflix because they have no sense of reality; their priorities are data collection without proper permissions which they sell on to advertisers and then having their Ai replace all bloggers with generated content stolen from human bloggers
Does anyone think Google is against SEO?
I have observed that some new websites are quickly ranked in the top three. They have almost no external links, keyword stacking, almost no social media, new domain names, some are full match domain names, some are keyword-free domain names, use AI text that has not been manually polished, and no videos. . . . From all angles, it is an anti-SEO operation, but the result is very good. .
So I wonder if Google has adjusted the weight of over-optimization to a large extent, especially websites that over-use certain SEO tools will be "hit", maybe Google wants to reshuffle, and the new algorithm does not like professional players.
Google feature "Charleston, North Carolina" 😵
My ecommerce site was hit hard by both of these updates too. I don't think the information you are giving regarding ecommerce is true. Google wants to get paid.
I lost 98%, and currently I am back to freelancing, But again working on new site, with new trending ideas.
Google Ai Overviews literally destroyed our website. Google went from search engine to answer engine.
The final push for the Google information at the end o f this video is so ironic….even more so for those of us who have also been impacted by these core updates that take even the few crumbs they left us with after the last one.
Google may be cracking down on AI generated content. Or it's definitely one of the things they looked at.
Why do I get the feeling this is just a motivational fluff piece to entice bloggers back who stopped using ahrefs after google killed everyone's blogs?
The same thing happened to us on our website, where we had to lay off the entire web content creation team and losing what we were built over the years 😢
FWIW : I just went to their website with my adblocker disabled, and it has about 4 (very sketchy-looking) ads loading at the same time, one of them being for a PDF tool that a non-savy person might mistake for one of their downloadable products. And then, clicking on a random blogpost (Thrift Flip: Upcycled Side Table Idea!) didn't load at all the first time around, the page was just stuck. IMHO the site itself needs a good cleanup, and would benefit from looking less like one of the many places pushing content farm articles.
With all these formerly successful websites going down, why are they not taking some of that profit and putting it into Google ads until you get the site back up organically? After all, if you were selling successfully organically, then you know spending money on ads should show a return. Right? I will bet anyone if you start paying for Google ads, you will start seeing your organic results rise again.