The March 2024 Google Algorithm update DESTROYED my lifestyle blog, reducing my traffic by 82%.
My blog, Schimiggy.com, is a lifestyle blog focused on sharing travel, fashion, beauty, food, and marketing/photography guides.
I am the sole person running and building my blog and have invested over 12+ years of extensive research and knowledge on the topics I write about.
I’ve been blogging since 2012. In 2018, blogging became my main source of income and I was able to live off my blog as my full-time gig. I also met and collaborated with many brands, PR representatives, influencers, and bloggers.
Meeting and creating with others in the creator community has been a huge blessing for me!
What Happened?
A huge chunk of my traffic comes from people searching on Google for information. Many people will come to my blog because I have travel, fashion, beauty, food, and marketing/photography guides.
Content is typically researched, written up and then optimized for Google search engine (this is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization).
My traffic had been steadily declining since 2023, but the March 2024 HCU update destroyed my traffic and in turn, destroyed my affiliate AND ad income.
In March 2024, Google released an update that penalized blogs for spammy blog content.
This impacted A LOT of bloggers whom the algorithm categorized their content as spammy. This new update allowed forums like Reddit to outrank bloggers. Reddit’s traffic increased by 126%!
And if you know Reddit, it’s not a credible source of information. Anyone can create an account and contribute to a thread without any knowledge or resources to back up their post.
This means that my blog links are pushed further down search engine result pages (known as SERPs) so that most searchers never find the content.
Google also released its Gemini AI feature in May 2024 with the motto being “Let Google Do the Googling for you.” This meant that Google would pull the data from other resources (ie blogs and lifestyle publications) and regurgitate it in a snippet format to users.
This was often generated without sources to point back to where Google got its information from, essentially STEALING from bloggers and content creators and often getting the information entirely wrong. Read more about Gemini AI here.
This sudden change has obliterated thousands of blogs and many bloggers are “returning to work” at normal jobs or leaving them without income or livelihoods.
This impact has decimated many bloggers and there is no straightforward answer to how bloggers can remediate the brutal results of Google’s AI and search engine updates.
Google is essentially capitalizing on our hard work to fuel the information you find on their search engine. Without us, Google is nothing.
Google dropped its “Don’t Be Evil” motto in 2015 and adopted a similar motto of “Do the right thing.”
It seems like Google has since then dropped their original “don’t be an asshole” ethos altogether.
Here’s How You Can Help
I am very thankful to have gained this knowledge and experience to guide and educate others with the content on my blog. Not being able to continue to do so meaningfully has left me feeling defeated and heartbroken. This sentiment is also shared with others in the blogging community near and far.
There is one company that is advocating for content creators! Raptive is a technology and media company that supports creators like me.
They’ve secured a meeting with Congress and are headed to Washington DC in June 2024 to meet with congressional staff and reporters about how Google exploits our work.
They have a petition and I beg you to please sign the letter.
You can also help my blog and stay in touch by joining my newsletter or connecting with me on social media.
Please share my story. The more we get the word out about what Google is doing, the better chances we have of finding someone or an agency that can fight back against Google and save the blogging community.
Thanks so much for all your support over the last 12 years. I believe that blogging is not entirely over. There’s still a chance for us to advocate for ourselves as AI becomes more prominent.
Big love to my blogging community near and far.
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