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Was Your Website Really Hit by the Google March Update?
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It sounds like a lot of people don’t understand what’s really going on. When I see people defending Google, I know they’re either Google propagadists acting like civilians or the bigger group of people are those who only see the world through their own narrow perspective. If Google’s update didn’t negatively impact their website, then everyone who complains has a spammy site, and they deserve it.
Some people assume that Google can do no wrong and they would never do anything that isn’t justified.
These assumptions that I keep reading from people are indicators that people aren’t looking at what Google has done across the SEO industry. You can’t have an accurate perspective on this issue unless you drop your prejudices and refrain from using your personal experience as the reference point in which the truth is measured against.
Some people live in a nice home, drive a respectable car, and have money in the bank, feeling good about their life. It’s a great position to be in. Congratulations —but wait, there’s one little problem for people like this —they project their experience of life outward, assuming life is good for everyone because their life is going well —incapable of understanding that good people end up homeless, innocent children who are murdered, did nothing to deserve it. and well educated people go bankrupt due to circumstances beyond their control.
The attitude of automatically assuming that the individual site owner failed to do something and therefore this is why they lost all their traffic reveals the lack of rational thinking, and it assumes that Google does not have a hidden agenda.
This superficial type of thinking is born out of an error in their thinking —a fault in logic that assumes the society we live in is rational and sane. The fault in their understanding is rooted in the discomfort one would feel if they seriously put their opinions aside and followed the data.
What if everything they thought was true about Google and SEO was a delusion, an elaborate hoax invented by the engineers and public relations representative at Google?
If your first thought is to blame the individual without gathering all the evidence, then i can confidently conclude that you’re not interested in the truth.
Many people don’t want to believe it, but the SERPS don’t lie. What happened to all of the small independent sites and businesses? Why are the SERPS comprised of a relative sameness, dominated by corporations, popular brands, e-commerce businesses, government agencies, official groups and clubs, and mainstream forums?
First, before you answer, go do a few random searches and tell me if I’m right or wrong. As I said, the SERPS don’t lie, and I’m not interested in my opinion.
Where are the small personal sites? The independent voices who wrote personal reviews —the sites that had “helpful” and “original” content that when you stumbled upon it, you felt as if you made a discovery. Where are the sites that do not fit into a specific official business related category —in other words, where have all the independent sites gone?
Google has repeatedly warned site owners that if they manipulated Google’s search results that they would be penalized.
Google said that if you write helpful original content for humans that they wouldn’t have to worry because Google will rank them fairly. John Mueller repeatedly told everyone to write helpful content, and the size of ones site did not matter. Google led everyone to believe that their main priority is to rank the most insightful, original, and helpful content, and you would be fairly ranked.
—And it was all a lie. Something changed in late 2020, in which Google’s interest in ranking the best content became secondary to Google beginning to engineer and manipulate search results to prioritize corporate content, brands, official agencies, clubs, forums etc., —the focus of Google’s SERPS was not about the actual quality of the content, but instead, it became about ranking sites that created the illusion of the best content.
The idea is that the literature says that people trust brands they know, official organizations and retailers, associations, famous people —so Google abandoned ranking independent sites that nobody recognized —even if they had the best written and most insightful content. This is why people are furious and feel betrayed —because a lot of sites have been penalized NOT because of the quality if their content or how helpful it is —NO, instead, thousands upon thousands of sites have been unfairly categorized as “worthless” because of — BECAUSE THEY are NOT a corporation or a massive brand, or famous.
Google has destroyed small independent sites because they are SMALL, and that is why what Google has done is an abuse of power.
This is no different than Google penalizing sites because the site owners are poor, Muslim, or Chinese. What does one have to do with another.
Google is giving the power and the visibility to the organizations and businesses that align with the government narrative and who will echo the voice of whatever the government narrative is. This is about control, and it is a blatant overstep in that it silences independent voices but attempts to mask it by blaming site owners for failing to follow Google’s nonsensical guidelines; a set of arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with writing exceptional content to human beings.
NOTE:
Go read up on NewsGuard and see what this government born agency is doing to news websites. Spend an hour reading how they are censoring websites, and you’ll begin to understand that THIS is a part of THAT. -
We run a network of 6 websites bringing in 70m sessions annually. One of those got hit by the HCU. The template / page structure is identical to 4 of the other sites that were not hit.All of our websites run in similar industries.
The site that got hit has a few key differences
1. not too many backlinks – we starting building a backlink profile in August 2023 – approx 100 backlinks from manual outreach to websites already linking to our competitors – there is a chance that we built too many links too quickly though I doubt it because of the HCU timing
2. Website was the youngest in our portfolio – it was launched a year and a half ago – no AI
3. It had a high amount of traffic for such a small amount of authority – this website was getting 200k sessions monthly now only 15k – we believe it is a combination of a lack of authority with overoptimised h1s/titles. Google doesn’t trust text in our h1’s / titles AT ALL it ignores all of these keywordsWe have adjusted all of our titles/h1s so that they are no longer stuffing keywords, stripped out some Advertising (doubt this will help but will improve user interaction) and hoping for the best. All of our other sites also keyword stuff but we think they have developed enough authority to be immune from google punishment
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Fishing for clients?
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Yep. Lost a great deal of traffic in December and then lost more in March.
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Sent you a PM
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Simple. When you see your daily traffic stat and it drops down massively around March 6-7, and then it continues to go down for the rest of the month then it means the site got hit. That’s the only obvious way to know. Traffic doesn’t normally drop by 90% overnight.
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