you know why google wants you to have helpful content? why google wants you to have page authority? why google wants to see a live person who has real experience with products or services? so that they can trust you when their AI comes to you to steal content and submit it as an AI generated answer to visitors in the SERPs.
One year ago, I was getting 120,000 page views per month and Google was loving my site. I was earning a full time income. This month it was down to 21,000 page views with a fraction of the money coming in. I do feel this was a helpful video and will implement some of these ideas.
Blogging is dead..but not for me..because i write about motorcycle..nobody can write like me.. even AI cant write like me.. so at this time i still survive
I'm gonna go ahead and tut my own horn and say that, for the most part, Google's catching up to what I knew and naturally do: 1. You have to cover the main topics, because you'll link to them often. 2. You have to cover adjacent topics, because you'll link to them to provide a throughout answer. 3. You have to cover the low competition topics, because that's your entryway. If you are covering long tail keywords, you'll have to research the main areas to provide an answer, then work your way down. If you are working your way down from the main keywords, you might as well write that main article and link to it from your long-tail article, since that provides a fuller picture and expands your knowledge. If this is your aim, an objectively throughout and exhaustive answer, you'll naturally create clusters, because anything else become utterly unmanageable and much too spread out to be of any value for a user with a specific question. And if this is your approach, you'll gain expertise as you go along, with each succeeding article becoming better and better as a result. Conclusion: be reasonable. Personally, I follow my own curiosity and the site becomes naturally cohesive. Start somewhere, and everything flows from there.
@user-gi5xo8rp4n I saw an interview recently on Doug Cunnington's channel, in which the interviewee told how she bulk published 1700 unreviewed and unedited lowest quality AI articles to a new website, which got a 400% boost from the so-called helpful content update. Go figure. I say this, mind you, not as an example to be emulated but solely to remark that Google is stumbling of late. I was surprised to learn that, small as it may be, Bing is steadily gaining market share and has been for years, as is Duckduckgo. More telling, for me, was first to experience and then hear people say that Bing is providing better answers nowadays. Telling, because that's how I switched from yahoo, way back when, to Google. As a content creator, it is in my best interest to consider that as wishful thinking, but it does not negate the fact that Google seems to be prioritizing authority over relevance, more so than they did in the past. In no small part, I believe, that is an aftermath of the Facebook fake news scandal and, more recently, on account of AI content. In that context, I expect turbulence and perhaps unwarranted and unmistakably overly-aggressive updates. It is disheartening to see one's work not come to fruition, and I suspect diversification, whichever form it may take, is appropriates in these times. My earlier comment, more than anything, was meant to relate that, now more than ever, it's important to follow a no-nonsense approach. In so doing, one may be able to foresee, rather than be caught off guard and have to react to, the general intent of these updates. That said, website owners, objectively speaking, have had it too easy. Compare this business to any other endeavor, and the standard approach to earning a living - a college education - in terms of the time, effort and money invested, relative to the returns, and you'll find that this industry is long-overdue for a severe tightening. Consider that nothing in this world, it being the means to everything else, is in more demand than money, and, if this industry is providing more for less, that alone is sufficient to expect hardships ahead.
Considering all the work this is gonna take, and knowing that AI is soon going to overtake SE results...it makes me wonder if this is all worth the effort.
This video was not what I expected it would be. You do a great job of creating content and explaining things, Ricky. When I grow up, I want to be good at RU-vid and SEO like you and Income School.
I thought 10 years ago blogging is dead. But some things just need a blog page. Like podcasts.... died when RU-vid was born and look where podcasts are today, more popular than ever.
Good point never thought of it like that. I think centralisation of podcasts in Spotify (and video podcasts) have helped their return. That and streaming I remember having to download them
Your emphasis on adding more personal experience to blog posts has really boosted my website's ranking noticeably! I'm the marketing person AND blogger for a small business, and while _I_ don't have a lot of stories from my own experience of what we do at the company, I can glean personal experience stories from the other employees at the company! That's working beautifully. Also, that _brilliant_ meme reference in your thumbnail. _Someone_ needs to acknowledge how amazing that was. 😂
I have 27 niche websites, some big (more than 500 articles), some small (less than 20 articles) 3 of those are all AI-generated content (with very mild personalizations to the content in the form of real-world examples PLUS enhanced EEAT). Those are the ONLY 3 websites NOT hit by the recent Google updates. Those AI websites are all more than a year old and all are going from strength to strength. What I will say though is that I have spent countless hours, probably upwards of 100 hours, writing, rewriting, and rewriting again all of my LLM AI Prompts. I have tried thousands of different variations and these need to be constantly adapted and updated. Prompting is now where I spend most of my time. But the resultant content from what my prompt engineering now provides is simply awesome. And it's certainly content that Google likes (for now anyway). The content I can now get these LLM to spit out is superior in every single way over what I could possibly write myself. And I have no doubt that it is just about ALL regurgitated content, it's just better presented in a more helpful manner than others might've presented it previously to Google. I don't think I will ever write another blog or article from scratch again. Keep the videos coming!
I have a blog with 450 articles. How do I identify which articles could be harming me? And what do I do with the articles I suspect could be? Is there a proven method of fixing it for people who want to fix this?
I'm surprised you still regard google. They clearly favor big companies over everyone. I literally googled project 24 with and without a blogging query. Income school came at number 15, eventhough I searched a direct keyword. All the big name blogs that clearly just use a lot of writers that have never done what they write about, came up first. It's obvious that someone gave them the topic and key phrases to use. Across the board, this is the issue I run into with google. I switched to bing for information and use google for shopping related searches, since bing sucks at that. Just use social media to drive traffic. Google has become small business unfriendly.
Google is still by far the most used search engine. Ignoring it would not serve us or our viewers. That said, our methods work on all search engines. As far as ranking for “Project 24” when I Google it from a logged out browser, I see us ranking #1, 2, and 3 all on sites we own. The #1 position being held by incomeschool.com. Google gives you search results based on your location, demographics, and history.
I have a first-hand travel blog where i write in-depth articles to locations I've actually visited and use high-quality photos with me in them. I was still massively hit by the HCU, my posts that are still doing okay are the more keyword-oriented ones.
The real world experience part is the dealbreaker for me. I'm not against it at all in principle - I just can't provide it where products are concerned. They're just too expensive to buy just for a review. I'm can't get round this fundamental obstacle so there's little point carrying on. I've not arrived at this decision likely - but I think experience is key when reviewing something and I can't provide that.
I have one of those niche sites that was wiped out. Obviously Google has flagged my site as unhelpful. So much for my first hand experience. Apparently, I don't have the right experience to tell anyone how to sell the art Ive sold professionally for over 20 years. Who am I to tell people how to draw the drawings I make and sell. What do I know about traveling the world looking for wildlife subjects to draw? I have only done that for most of my adult life. Am I supposed to have split those into 3 seperate blogs? Really? Is my blog perfect? If course not, but I used the guidelines and didn't take risks with the algorithm and where did that take me? To the bottom. 3 years of hard work. It might not be the end of blogging but you are one algorithm update from the end of your blog.
the HCU was a brand update, Google simply penalized you for not being a brand; that means you likely didn't have a social media presence; Google cannot know whether you are an expert in something, only by being a brand
@@flaviumircea4012He has, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and a local store address. Those signals should be enough for Google to recognize him as a human / brand. I'd like to see the recent traffic drop per page to see what's going on.
In the same boat as you, Kevin. Posts only written by myself, a runner for 20 years, and one other longtime runner. My 4-year-old blog, which day one was built from Income School methods, lost about 80% of its' traffic in one fell swoop in Sept. I am lucky that the main part of my business is driven by RU-vid. I really feel for the people who were making the majority of their income from their blog. It's super sad. A reminder to us all to diversify I guess. I really hesitate to put a lot of work back into my blog because I worked really hard to make the content as helpful as possible and couldn't have predicted this. Wishing you all the best in the future - your drawings are amazing and look like you have so much to offer people.
the Blogging industry is an interesting thing. We have been talking about how niche sites are now a hard play and yet they thrive for local seo and ecom seo as good as ever.
Absolutely! Good point. I'm working with businesses who recognize the value of content marketing, specifically blogging, and who don't know how to do it. If blogging for yourself doesn't work for someone, they should consider running the content strategy for a company.
@@IncomeSchool Yeah, I’m a search guy so i have my hand is various pies across blogging, local seo, ecom and even ebay. It’s fascinating watching Google completely dismantle content marketing for bloggers while keeping their other algorithms largely stable. I suspect the pandemic gave Google a lot of useful data that made it pretty clear their content ranking algo was not doing a good job. Then ChatGPT enforced that.
Maybe I just need to do a mind map because this is not making sense to me. Almost sounds like be specific but not too specific. And be more general but at the same time focus on subcategories.
AI is changing the game and another thing is that competition is tough for so many topics now. To stand out we need to produce very good, authentic content, based on real experience, real feeling, real pictures, videos… things that remain out of reach for AI. People are in need of real experience, they’re searching for interesting people. Regarding Google, it has always been clear that the focus for content creator should be on the user not the algorithm. If you go full throttle in your topic (including outreach, getting a degree or training), you’d naturally do what is expected. One last thing is that maybe the strategy should not rely on blogging alone or even on internet alone, actions on the ground are something to consider.
"Regarding Google, it has always been clear that the focus for content creator should be on the user not the algorithm." That's the height of irony, isn't it? Everybody's been saying that for years, and for years the content that comes out of a search is less and less relevant.
Thanks Ricky, but the topical authority vs longtail thing is very confusing for a newbie like myself, because Kyle Roof says you must stay within your tier and only go for the kw within it. Si who's right? These two pieces of advice contradict one another, don't they?
Curious to learn more about this qualifier and if Google will publish details about unhelpful content and ways to adjust. I have a site that is roughly half of the traffic now than it was 4 to 5 weeks ago.
7 месяцев назад
Google has killed not niche sites, but their classic way of doing things. Why would Google rank a purely informative website? For a website to rank at the bottom of the funnel, it has to have a function. This means providing a service, product, consultancy or something else. This means that resource context is a must. Sometimes it can even be a form. Niche sites mostly offer pure information without any way for a user to commercially satisfy a query. This means a site that is a pure representation of a concept map without the idea of source context or search intent. I think Google doesn't want these types of sites anymore. It wants branded websites that have a clear function on their own and give better rankings. In 2024, try to add a function to the sites in your projects. It is not possible to progress much with pure information sites.
Some great suggestions here. The anonymity issue is really key right now. Even some sites with a well done About Me page and personal photo got slapped in the latest updates. More and more we need to show some evidence of the blog author existing outside the blog - references to that person that exist outside of the website. Any suggestions on how to do this? There's outreach/collab, plus sites like LinkedIn/FB. But is there kind of a blogging/SEO equivalent of LinkedIn that you're aware of? Just somewhere where we can set up a profile, with photo, explain who we are, list all our sites, and link out to this profile from all our blogs? Any sites that can allow us to do this?
I would imagine just start answering questions under your author name on Quora, or in forums etc. Eventually, your name will show up in the search results as an authority in your field.
Hi Ricky, just a random question again, but if we want to rewrite an article (with no backlinks and very little pageviews), would you use a new url (and remove the old one) or would you just update the post with the new content (and thus keep the url)? Vey curious to your insights. Also, will you do a Q&A sometime again? Thank you!!
That's not a good idea. You should only change the URL of a blog post if it is not SEO-friendly, for example, due to duplicated URLs, a wrong URL structure, an excessive number of characters, etc. If the URLs are fine for your old blog post without traffic, simply update the content for a better search intention fit and review the internal links. Avoid changing URLs whenever possible.
@@miguitaleleblog3514 I do not agree, it can be better because it Google didn't like that page and it can take very long for Google to give it the change it deserves. But I'm not sure since things are changing so quickly. That's why I'm curious what Ricky thinks right now.
My site (130 posts) got hammered by the helpful content update. I’m going to go through all posts and evaluate if they are helpful…what should I be looking for?
I've been struggling for quite some time with all my rankings. Slowly but surely my rankings have gotten lower and lower. When I analyze the syrup what I see is more videos ahead of my written contact. In so many of my keywords I am still the first article. However, once you get four videos ahead of you that isn't worth much! :(
Could you please explain how the one-page website for the Exact Match Domain (EMD) will function? Specifically, I am referring to creating a domain name that closely matches popular search terms and subsequently generating additional articles that support this domain and linking them to the main article on the homepage. Does this strategy remain effective or not?
Why are so many channels teach on utube copy and paste, making more money than the original creation, avoid copyright. Google calls it adding Value. When a viewpoint of camera is on the side ,its like you talking to.no one , thanks for sharing this video
Come on, man, putting a graphic to point to the thumbs up? With all the different devices and apps for RU-vid? 😀 I couldn't even get it to come close to that area, and I'm just watching in Chrome.
The like button is located in a slightly different place depending on the screen resolution. So it generally points to the lower right. It’s not intended to be the exact location. Most RU-vid users know where the like button is… Oh, and you’re welcome for the free content.
Some of all kinds. That’s the thing. It varies from site to site, not just type to type. There are niche sites that are going strong and others that got decimated. The same is true across niches and site types. There have also been so many updates that most people seem to have been affected at least a little by at least one.
Great video as always..Bro you have to admit if your starting out or been in game for a bit it’s def getting harder n harder to compete with Reddit, Forbes,SGE etc…if you have a DR of 0 with less than 25 articles and are just learning part time -how do you build enough links and authority ? How much money does it take to go from 0 to a full time income -blogging and finally does it even make sense to do so?? Thx!!
Has anyone tried this? Typing 'is blogging dead?' and finding results from years ago? Like, I have found results writing about this even in 2007.. try it with advanced search. It's not a new thing - How exactly can AI kill blogging though I seriously don't understand. AI cannot watch a movie and tell you how it liked it? I mean as a movie enthusiast, I am not just looking reviews of one website to see if I should go watch it ... I will watch it and come back to read if anyone else has liked/disliked the parts of it..? Just an example.. people blog about soooooo many stuff, people read blogs for so many reasons even.. AI can write articles, write movie scripts, or even novels, and people WILL consume it for some years.. but it won't take long for people to understand that something is missing in new age entertainment. I think a lot of people don't know how AI works at all. More importantly, people don't know how people or the world works
Yes we are talking about the unknowable to some degree. I am more in the camp of it being far more disruptive than many realise, but i see a want for imperfect human interaction will increase for sure.
Ironically, your content is being judged by AI (the entire Google algorithm is AI based). So if you think AI does not work well with human content, what makes you think Google is doing great in understanding helpful content. They can't as seen by this failure of an HCU update.
You don't know how to use prompts if that's the case. You can get AI to train and write like a human with experience. You just need to build the right prompts in.@@sblijheid
Nope people will always love a good blog article. Write about something you love and know about and produce good quality content. All that google is doing is getting better and better at weeding out poor blogs with bad content written for no other purpose than to make money.
How will be the future of blogging in an era of AI answering all relevant information about a query without going through several websites. You may show new income ways for subscribers to remain with you
What are some other ways to generate traffic to our site without using google? I can’t imagine blogs/websites just completely disappearing because of ai. I feel that the way information is packaged is the defining factor. Does Income school teach how to incorporate a blog along with a Shopify store?
We don't specifically teach how to incorporate a Shopify store, but it's not too complicated. I'm actually building a site for a company right now that wants to use Shopify for their order management so that could turn into content for this channel. And yes, then it would be FREE! We also recommend several different avenues to grow EEAT, which includes several non-Google approaches to growing your audience. Most people should pick at least 1 social media platform to be on based on their niche and all bloggers should be getting interviewed on podcasts.
Thank you for your response! It sounds like blogging is just becoming more of a solid business model now and not just a hobby that could generate money!
This is the missing link. Getting traffic. Shopify has blog functionality but you have to figure out how to customize it to do the things you can do in Wordpress. It can be done, it just takes some work. I'm having trouble cracking the traffic part -- and worried about the economy. It's not doing as well as the media tells us.
This guy does not know what is happening now, He started a blog at the beginning of the year, and now he also does not know how to get traffic on it. He has nothing new to discuss, just reading Google blogs and making videos.
Very useful information, thank you! I need to add more articles in those competitive search queries, good to know that they are important, not just the ones with expertise.
Google doesnt have a clue what helpful and unhelpful content looks like, just looking at the SERP anyone can see that. They cant even identify EEAT either, its basically all just link building. Take for example the following: Professional cannabis journalist, copywriter, and author Adam Parsons is a long-time staff member of Zamnesia. Tasked with covering a wide range of topics from CBD to psychedelics and everything in between, Adam creates blog posts, guides, and explores an ever-growing range of products. Why is this website or "journalist" outranking people in the mycology space who have first hand knowlege of growing mushrooms, with pictures of them growing the mushrooms for years on end. Not just that quite a bit of the information this "expert" (according to google) is writing, is wrong. The main reason is they sell products.
For older articles, when having built up 1,000+ articles over the years, is it best to remove older articles that aren't maybe as helpful? Will search ranking go up if this older content is pruned?
Great job from Google most of the writers lost job, working in largest companies they implement Ai to write content now the Google introduce algorithm changes to reward personal anecdotes, it's the only way to beat against Ai content.In short your content need to be more humane
If that actually happens, we’ll be talking about it. In the meantime, we’ll be adapting to change and seizing the opportunities left by those who quit or couldn’t adapt.
@@IncomeSchool Thank you for the reply, I hoped you would act in such ways as i do believe you are good people. Yet i am aware some are burying their head in the sand or not realising the utter disruption we are in for. Thank you.
If blogs die due to AI, then AI won't be able to scape information to get updated answers, which means people will have to go to different places for answers, which means bloggers can create content answer those questions. Blogs will exists but most likely behind a paywall with traffic coming from somewhere else besides Google.
@@goodfellabeats I understand what you mean. In the event of AI totally integrating itself within human lives, humans will long for the "human" touch more. But i feel it will be away from blogs and be within video if not IRL. As for where AI will get their info from, i think they will scrape video content instead.
@@riptideL That's doubtful. I know engineers developing tech using LLM and they are a long ways away from replacing what trillions of internet pages that exists. A very long ways away. And even then, it is about user adoption rather than AI capabilities. Plus, video has been threatening text information for over 100 years. 20 years ago the internet was supposed to replace books but booksellers like Barnes & Noble are actually opening new locations.
Google themselves announce many of these changes. Some of their liaison employees comment on them on X and on their RU-vid channel. Other analysts look at search ranking data whenever these updates happen to track the big changes. There are tons of sources anyone can find. One of the many things we do is boil it all down into a single video for you.
Very helpful video. I've been feeling the same about SEO as AI started taking off. It's going to take more intention in your writing to get somewhere because now everyone can just churn out content for search engines. It makes sense Google will punish these sites.
Google wants this, Google likes that, Google Google GOOGLE!. I just don't get why almost everyone spends soooo much time & effort kissing Google's a**!. They are not The only search engine.
They just represent most of the search engine traffic… so you think the best move is to ignore them? I’m not kissing up to them. But I’m making you aware of what’s working so you can benefit from Google traffic. We also talk about other traffic sources. But Google drives the most traffic.