How Did Authority Bloggers Beat the Google Update?
Google finally declared the so-called March update over, even though there were signs of continued volitility for a week after the announcement.
Theories abound as to what the intent was, with a leading thought being “disintermediation”.
IE. If there is going to be a middleman, then Google wants to be it. Especially where Google has existing services or tools that work for that role, eg. Travel.
Seems Google has dialled up the algorithm against “overly-optimized” sites, especially those intended to send people away (ads or affiliates).
While Authority Bloggers do make money from affiliates, and a lesser extent ads, most are designed to:
- Grow a loyal audience who know, like, and trust us.
- Build products and services around our knowledge, advice and experience.
- Become a vital part of a community.
These are not the sites that Google wants to get rid of!
So rather than Authority Bloggers “beating Google”, instead we are (hopefully) providing Google what they want to see.
In fact, while the feeds are full of people who lost all the traffic, the sites that have gained (outside of huge communities like Reddit) seem to be those who follow our pattern.
Of course that is not to say we haven’t been hit, just in the most part way less harshly, and in many cases we can identify why.
80-20% Content
The main defence against getting hit with the hammer is to show that you are audience-first in your content.
- Diversify your traffic sources.
- DO NOT make every new post an SEO article, or even the majority, be based around obvious keyword research and optimization.
- Encourage your visitors to stick around and read multiple articles.
I feel vindicated if this is 100% the case because I have always preached attraction, retention, and conversion.
That is, you need to nurture your audience once you have gotten their attention, and people don’t want to read a constant stream of SEO articles.
Ecommerce
Another potential winner here are, keeping the above in mind, sites that “check out” locally, rather than send the visitor to another domain.
That doesn’t mean websites that sell physical products necessarily, so you digital product creators and service-oriented folks sure look smart right now too.
Gated
It occurs to me that Google wanting to provide the answers, rather than provide a link to the answer, means that we need to have less of our most valuable implementation information and strategic advice behind a gate.
Especially when users will become less and less trusting of “AI” answers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love information to be shared generously, and not everything deserves to have friction added, but combining several of the ideas above, along with Google becoming more and more an “answer engine” means we need to keep something back.
This can be behind an email opt-in, pay what you want, or a high ticket coaching course. All you are doing is making it not easy to duplicate, growing an attentive community, and also raising the perceived value of your advice.
For now, I don’t think Amazon Kindle books have anything to worry about from SGE (Search Generative Experience), for example.
Helpful
On 16th April Google also apparently updated a system that impacted September “Helpful Content Update” sites even more severely.
Google has not yet clarified whether the Classifier is still active for the entire site or for a single page. At the moment it still seems for the entire domain.
UGC
On the other hand, user-generated content (AKA forums) are getting a boost.
In fact, forums can be boosted even without much of any newly added posts. Below is a site shared by Lily where most content is 10+ years old, and is not seasonal:
Next Steps
As yet, nobody seems to have recovered from any site-wite drops. This means it could be months before some of these sites show signs of improvement.
This is scary stuff, and it will for sure be the final straw for many site owners.
For the rest of us it shows how important it is to focus on marketing strategy, not just SEO.
Do not rely on any single source of traffic or revenue.
Spend time in your niche and see where else people get their information, and see what they buy in terms of products, especially information products.
I have been having some success sharing posts in Facebook pages and groups for my niches.
Right now I have a huge discount on my full marketing audits until I am out of spare capacity, so if you want me to give your site and approach a health check, you might want to get on that.
