Greetings anon,
It’s been nearly two weeks since our site lost 65% of its traffic. We’ve spent this time monitoring the site, digging into data, and speaking with several SEO consultants. Dealing with a huge traffic loss is never fun, so we will make the most of it and try and try to impart some learnings.
As much as this sucks, it’s important to look at the silver lining.
This is recoverable, it’s just a matter of how much time and energy we want to put into it.
Last month when traffic was ripping, we were dealing with a big OOS situation for our top affiliate. This was resolved the day before traffic tanked, and revenue has actually remained pretty much neutral since this happened because fixing the OOS situation seemed to almost make up for Amazon Associates and Mediavine losses. The site is still making $60-$80/day, so as of now, we can still fund “recovery initiatives” without additional personal investment.
After collecting data and speaking with the consultants, we will walk through the diagnosis the “experts” gave, our opinion on what happened, and our action plan to hopefully fix the site.
Quick Dos and Don’ts If This Happens To You
Immediately begin tracking your top 200 keywords on mobile and desktop. We went with Accuranker. Ideally, you should have a tool set up like this (we did not), so you can see how everything drops and have premade segments based on categories and types of posts.
If you make a large technical change, you should save the old version for at least 60 days in case something breaks.
Be wary before hiring a consultant. I got quoted anywhere from $250/hour to $7k just to do an audit. There are a few “top guys” that are super expensive that are probably worth it if you were doing $5k/month. If you are lower than that, I would stay away from anyone who wants to charge you before even looking at your site or asking any questions. You shouldn’t expect consultants to run a charity, but if you are going to pay thousands of dollars, they can poke around in GSC for 20 minutes and ask a few questions before making you cut a check. If you do cut a check, wait at least three weeks, so they have some real data to look at.
What the Experts Said
We talked with 6 people. I would say only 2 did a thorough audit. The rest poked around for 15-20 minutes and said it was definitely a penalty. Obviously, we didn’t love hearing this. Recommendations ranged from adding more references to every single post to link building to hiring a doctor to “medically review” every post. One guy actually didn’t believe we had only built two backlinks over the last year and said he couldn’t work with us if we refused to be honest 🤣
The guy that we thought had the highest “SEO IQ” thought the drop was due to a myriad of issues but believed that the site’s response time was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” It has risen over the last few months primarily due to the increasing number of review posts (currently 24 on the site out of 237 posts)
He (and a few other SEOs) gave us a list of recommendations to implement to try and reverse the penalty/downslide. The one recommendation we got from everybody was to test one thing at a time and use the scientific method so we would know what actually fixed the site instead of doing 10 changes at once.
IMO this is horrible advice. That strategy would take months. As long as everything I’m doing is actually improving the site IDGAF if I know the exact thing that fixes the traffic. I’ll consider all the changes to be best practices going forward, but I refuse to act like a scientist in a lab during the biggest shopping month of the year. This is a business, not a chemistry class.
To be clear, this isn’t every recommendation we were given (when you have 6 SEOs giving opinions, there start to be too many cooks in the kitchen, and you have contradictory recommendations). Because of this, we had to draw the line somewhere and use data and our gut to decide what actually to implement.
✅ means we already did this, ⏳ means we are still working on it
Make The Homepage Helpful ✅
There is a fair amount of content on our homepage, but everything above the fold is for email capture. There is a big “Get the free guide” button with a picture of a guidebook we give in exchange for an email. This isn’t the “most helpful” thing that could be at the top of the homepage. So we moved it to the bottom and instead have some text, popular posts, and categories above the fold now. It definitely helps from a crawling and authority standpoint, but we will definitely get less emails.
Pitching For Links Going To Our Aged Domain ⏳
One guy reached out and asked if the site was built on an aged domain (it was not “built” on an aged domain, but one was redirected about two months before we bought the site with 0 traffic impact). He had two sites built on aged domains, and both tanked within 24 hours of ours…
Although there was no immediate traffic bump from redirecting the aged domain to our site, it could have helped new content rank. If Google randomly reduced the value of links from the aged domain, it could have sent the whole house of cards tumbling down.
To try and mitigate this, I compiled a list of the 30 best links going to the aged domain. We are in the process of pitching them to switch the link to the current domain. It’s a short and sweet note that basically says we rebranded and would really appreciate it if you switched the link and anchor text to the correct domain. Ironically, I actually knew one person who worked at one of the top 3 sites linking to the aged domain and got him to update the link. So 1/30 so far!
Updating About & Author Pages ⏳
I’ve always said the about page is extremely important. Especially in the health space, you need to go a little overboard to establish credibility and authority. I thought our about page and author profiles were really good… Turns out I wasn’t looking at the real author profiles. We have bios on our about page for every author, but their actual author page is different. The author page was a one-sentence bio about each of the authors with a list of articles they wrote below. So basically, our author profiles were only one sentence a piece despite having a separate profile on the about page. These are controlled in the “user section” of WordPress. It’s also where the “author schema” is wrapped. I mistakingly thought we had author schema on the about page. I was wrong.
We are updating the actual author profiles to be 300-500 words a piece. This should be done by Friday (11/18/2022)
Category Updates ✅
Our category pages only held 12 posts per page. We updated this to hold 30 per page. This isn’t really a big deal when you only have 237 posts, but it still reduces the crawl budget, so it was worth trying. If you have 1,000+ posts this is definitely worth doing.
Breadcrumbs ✅
A few months ago, Ahrefs came out with a study on category pages and breadcrumbs. Although it was targeted at e-commerce websites, I found it incredibly insightful. One of the things they recommended was moving breadcrumbs to the bottom of the page. The said users don’t care about it, and Google can still read it without any trouble. Every SEO who saw this on my site hated it. So we moved it back to the top. We also had the H1 in the breadcrumbs and removed the title so instead of :
Home > Category > Post H1
it’s now
Home > Category
AMA Block ✅
The Helpful Content Update came out in September. Many people thought this was Google going after AI (they are always going after AI), but not much happened. Several SEOs recommended we add a block towards the bottom of every post that says something like “Still need more info? Send us a message, and we’ll get you an answer within 24 hours” This shows to Google you are trying to be as “helpful” as possible, and hard to believe something like that would hurt the bounce rate.
Table of Contents Updates ⏳
The person with the strongest “SEO IQ” recommended that we expand the TOC by default. Currently, it’s compressed and looks like the picture below. It will only expand if you click the button on the right.
His recommendation was to expand this table, so it is easier for users to navigate. He also said expanding it makes it more likely to capture the featured snippet for a given keyword. We are going to try this on a few posts but honestly feel that this is kind of an annoying user experience since you have to scroll a lot more. We also want to be cautious not to kill conversions on the 4-5 posts that are now bringing in ~90% of the revenue.
Switching Hosting Providers ⏳
Again the guy with the highest “SEO IQ” said he had seen several sites using Cloudways randomly tank. He switched them to a hosting provider called Bigscouts and they recovered 3-5 weeks later. We are pretty skeptical about this but he showed us very clear examples, and honestly what do we have to lose at this point?
Hire a Doctor To Medically Review Posts ⏳
The age-old health site authority hack. Look at a site like Healthline and you’ll see that pretty much all of their posts are medically reviewed by a doctor. As you can probably imagine doing this is super expensive. We’ve considered doing it before, but it would have drastically reduced content output. We always decided to go with maximum content production.
The agency we hired to write November’s content offered a doctor to medically review the posts for free. Of course, this will cost an additional $60 per article after the intro offer.
This can’t hurt, but I don’t expect it to help too much. Google is becoming more entity-driven and less text-driven. In layman’s terms, this means Google doesn’t care as much that we are claiming a doctor is medically reviewing posts. Any website can do that. They want to see the doctor link back to us, whether it’s their Linkedin or their own website. This doctor will not be doing that, so I think the upside is limited. If we did this for real, we would want the doctor to list themself as our Medical consultant on Linkedin or on the about page of their own website (ideally both). If you are going to pay for this, I recommend paying more for someone who has a legit online presence and force them to have a section on the website endorsing your site with a do-follow link.
Bring Mediavine Back ⏳
At this point, even if the traffic decrease is somewhat speed related, there is something else going on. Ads have been off for almost two weeks, and nothing has come back, or even improved. You are never supposed to turn Meidavine ads off and at this point, we are probably close to getting kicked out. We will give it another day or two but seems like there is little to no risk at this point to bring ads back to the site. Ironically if we do this and other conversions keep up we could actually hit ATH revenue in December.
Wrapping Up
It’s impossible to know if any of this will work or how long it will take. Despite losing 65% of our traffic, we are still making 3x as much revenue as when we bought the site. Need to be grateful for that. We will implement these changes and then sit back for a few weeks.
Once the dust settles, we will institute a new policy where 50% of the revenue is held back for the next site we buy. This hopefully takes some risk off the table as it will be difficult to sell this site for a few months at minimum if there is no traffic recovery. There are other things we can try if this doesn’t work but will save that for a later time.
Wishing you and your family a restful Thanksgiving,
❤️
BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug
We have them listed below along with whether or not we are actually going to do them. Based on the data we have collected so far I doubt anything will change until the next core algo update, so there is pressure to get all of this ready ASAP.
It’s a bit ironic that one of the primary reasons we wanted a niche site portfolio was to have an asset not correlated with the crypto, stock, or real estate markets. In the end our site ended up imploding a few days before FTX lol. So much fort that
Medical Aff sites are challenging, thanks to all of the EAT requirements. Poor Dr. Axe has yet to recover. I feel that a lot of EAT comes from the backlinks. but onpage physical address, business social and personality social links seems to have a higher correlation these days among ranking sites in finance and medical.
I've done a few aff site recoveries, now. If you want an audit, hit me up on twitter @lostcyclingdude, and we can exchange an audit for a newsletter mention.
The FTX line at the end lol. Keep fighting the good fight bros. Inspiring to read your journey. Hopefully MediaVine can help you regain some ground