(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on January 30th, 2020. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while. This one, in particular, we’ll be revisiting soon for reasons that’ll become very clear once the Vault is launched.)
How To Survive Big Tech Algo Updates
Let’s talk about SEO, and specifically, what’s occurred in the past year or so.
I saw on Twitter earlier a tweet about organic traffic being a permanent thing. That’s not the case. In 2019, I experienced a 65%+ drop in traffic on websites that had had a consistent stream of traffic for years.
Bear in mind, I have websites in many different verticals and niches.
But Jamie… maybe you’re doing something wrong.
I went through a lot of things; I figured maybe my websites were slow to load. (Some are.) Maybe the design was dated. (Again, most are – I’m waiting on Thrive’s much anticipated and seemingly-forever-coming Theme Builder because most of my sites operate using Thrive Leads and Ultimatum for funnels and I don’t want to deal with compatibility issues.)
And let’s be honest, the niche websites and whole thing with actually reading is dated, so maybe thousands of words simply aren’t in fashion anymore.
It turns out though that I wasn’t the only one who suffered; after massive algorithm changes in June and October/November, many people found their sites dropping off exponentially in search results pages.
Now, this was across a wide range of sites. This leads me to address a misconception.
Sometimes, It’s Not Your Fault
I could buy, and did buy, for a long time, that I was using outdated approaches to online business.
I wrote the Normie Niche Site guide way back knowing that my approach should change.
And so when guys like Kyle Trouble and 30 Days To X, among others, reported that they too had experienced stuff falling off, I doubled-down on buying the narrative.
After all, most of us have niche sites, we all learned from similar materials and at a similar time, and I thought that our way of doing internet business was simply done.
However…
After multiple income streams dried up over H2 of 2019, I spent a lot of time researching what was going on.
And despite protests to the contrary, it’s not just, “Google is now filtering for readable content and so your SEO tricks don’t work anymore.”
That was literally what people said in 2012 with Panda and Penguin updates. SERP crawlers have been able to measure natural language for many years.
So far as SEO tricks, mine have extended over the past few years solely to:
- Writing high quality content
- Clearly labelling headings and subheadings
- Using relevant pictures
So, it’s pretty offensive to be told “Haha you weren’t writing for humans.”
Especially when, across the various sites and publications I’ve written for, I’ve been read millions of times by millions of people.
And let’s go a step further just to rant a little; part of this update was about filtering out “unreliable news” on the part of Big Tech. We’ll get to that shortly.
However… on unreliable news. My sites got an absolute tanking. Yet the viral news site I worked for back in the day; filled with viral nonsense, thin content and stuff that isn’t really written for human audiences at all, got a boost during the algorithm updates.
Big Tech Will Do What It Does
Among the most affected sites during the June updates were news websites.
The Daily Mail had a 60-70% drop overnight.
Other news websites literally had to shut down and make their staff redundant in the following months because of no advertising revenue.
Remember, if the reasons given for the algorithm update were in part about human readability, then you’d have to explain why news sites; specifically written for humans, and in the case of the Daily Mail, one of the biggest sites for long-form news articles in the world; are being penalised.
It’s very easy to get conspiracy-theory about things, but at a certain point, you have to go the other way and point out that a lot of people have a Stockholm-Syndrome coincidence theory.
When Google delists news articles for political reasons and rolls out “random” updates that obliterate competitor websites while propping up properties that they own,
(e.g. Dailymotion videos experiencing a drop while YouTube SERPs increased by 21% in the same period,)
You have to assume there’s a vested interest going on.
And realistically… we know these companies have vested interests. I’m not saying it’s a worldwide censorship campaign, but Big Tech will do what it does and we’re just minnows in their pond.
And ultimately, when companies don’t tell the truth about what they’re doing and why, it’s time to get your tinfoil hat out just for a little while.
What To Do About It
Whenever I get bogged down in the big picture economy stuff, I always try and bring it back around to what I can actually do about it.
And during the past year, I’ve been figuring out what to do about a couple of things:
- My drop in site rankings and how to fix the SEO of my sites
- How to not rely on SEO going forward
And most of those things have been measures I’ve put in the Direct Response Newsletter.
I’m figuring them out slowly but surely.
But a key takeaway I’ve found that anyone can apply right now:
Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten soft. It used to be that I was constantly iterating, failing, trying new stuff and winning.
Then I worked out how things fit together. At the time, I got comfortable. Passive income, building assets and leaving them, taking my eye off the ball.
When you’re comfortable, you will feel this temptation. However, the correct approach is to, when times are good, put the excess energy (be it capital, ideas or pure personal sunshine,) into iterating more and trying to find better strategies.
Because nothing is constant and nothing is a guarantee, ultimately.
And you want to do it when times are good and not when times are bad.