Even though Google November Algorithm update is rolled out almost a 4 months ago, many websites are still negatively affected and not able to recover. What I am seeing almost on a daily basis is that quality websites are being punished for nothing and all those years of hard work and playing by the rules resulted with a sudden traffic loss of up to 80%.
To illustrate how messed up is this whole situation with November Update, I’ll give you an example of one website that is seriously impacted and still not able to recover.
Kevin’s Website Disaster
Kevin started his own mobile phone review website a 10 years ago. All the content on the website is exclusively written by Kevin and the content is unique & valuable. His website is properly SEO optimized, he never ever used any black hat techniques to artificially improve his rank and his backlinks are 100% natural. From the very beginning his focus was on writing a quality content that will help people make certain decisions. His website articles are being shared frequently by readers on every social media channel.
Approx. a 2 years ago, Kevin reached to the point to have stable 100.000 organic visitors on a monthly basis. So, he simply continued to do everything as before, to write reviews, optimize the website from time to time by following Google SEO guidelines (!) and in November 2019 a complete disaster…
His traffic went suddenly down from 100.000 to around 30.000 visitors a month, pretty much overnight.
Let’s summarize. 100% unique and quality content recognized by readers, perfect SEO and good rank, website loading time perfect, usability/readability perfect, social media engagement perfect, good backlinks without negative SEO spam (by competitors for instance), YouTube channel with more than enough followers. Everything, everything perfect and then Google decides that you’re not so good as you think.
Don’t know about you, but I’m shocked and wonder what next we can expect. If playing strictly by the rules is not enough to succeed over time and stay at the top or at least near the top, than I don’t know what to say. Maybe everyone should rely only on premium ads, that would certainly make Google happy… you know what I mean.
Who is Not Affected by Google November Update?
Big players are obviously not affected, businesses that can afford to invest thousands or millions in marketing, premium ads etc… Imagine if you are Google. Why would you give 20.000 (organic) visitors to someone for free when you can simply redirect those visitors somewhere else and get nicely payed for it.
How to Recover?
Let’s face it, Search Engine Optimization as we know it is almost dead. You can do everything right and end up in a same situation as Kevin or maybe you can succeed, it’s almost like winning the lottery. So, basically, competition is rapidly increasing in every possible field and if you’re not ready to give Google what he wants, your competitors will.
It’s all about profit and #1 thing that Google wants is to have you buy their premium ads so you can be on the top of the search results and be able to expand your business.
If you don’t have a budget for ads or don’t want to go in that direction, than focus on reaching your target audience via other channels. Social medias, referrals, affiliates, local ads, YouTube, newsletters (email campaigns), off-line marketing etc.. etc…
If I am affected by Google November Update and have a established website with a decent rank/traffic, I would fix on-site SEO issues (if any), improve the speed/usability and wouldn’t do any drastic changes till I see what will happen next. Kevin’s example is very similar to many other horror stories. Imagine if now Kevin do some drastic changes throughout an entire site, change everything hopping that he will finally recover. Guess what may happen. It may happen that he end up losing everything, including the current rank that is already negatively affected by November Update.
So, basically Google is trying to confuse everyone, the search engine is no longer a search engine, it’s a marketing company.
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