Google Offers Few Answers as Independent Creators Lose up to 90% of Traffic
By: Christiana Sciaudone
Kern Campbell started a blog in 2016 as he rebuilt an old Jeep. To his surprise, 40 people read it. Then 400, then 9,000. He was taking in $1,200 a month, which paid for the car parts. After talking to people who had grown their own sites to tens of thousands of dollars a month, Campbell went all in.
He built 15 blogs under a company called RockTide Media that hit one million page views a month each. The money was “just coming in like crazy, wow. It was so much fun. It was truly a success story.”
He hired 47 people to help write content for the sites. “I was just building this huge empire,” Campbell told AMO. Then in 2023, something changed with Google’s search engine. A tech site of Campbell’s that had been doing 1 million page views a month tumbled to 30,000. The auto blog with a million readers fell to 100,000. Campbell is down to two writers.
Campbell’s is not a rare story.
Digital media of varying sizes have reported seeing plummeting traffic from Google, with several tales of being forced to lay off writers and founders having to seek out full-time jobs to survive. The tech behemoth regularly makes changes to its algorithms to “present helpful and reliable results for searchers.” By removing visibility for creators like Campbell, they are essentially calling their content unhelpful and unreliable. While there are certainly spam sites that flourish online, the publishers AMO spoke to are all independent creators who started with a passion for a subject.
Google called 20 such creators to its headquarters in California earlier this week to talk about the fact that their websites have become all but irrelevant to Google—even as Google admitted that all 20 of them were making quality content, according to attendees of the event.
Google didn’t respond to requests for comment about the situation and the event, but some creators have not been shy.
Joshua Tyler of Giant Freakin Robot, an entertainment, science, tech and culture website, called it a funeral. Rutledge Daugette of game reviewer TechRaptor was less dour, noting that it seemed like Googlers (the very few to be found on campus) listened intently and even cried at their stories of woe. While there’s no expectation of a complete reversal, Daugette, at least, hopes that Google heard their voices and stories and will incorporate changes in the future to give them a chance at survival.
“It’s depressing, and all I can really hope is that Danny [Sullivan, Google’s search liaison] and Google are true to their word that they want to figure it out,” Daugette told AMO after the get together.
In the meantime, Daugette, who has a full-time job in IT management, is looking to build a new website. Campbell, who recently sold his stake in a financial practice, is trying to find ways to resuscitate his blogs.
Ready Steady Cut, a film and tv review site, has seen one founder return to his full-time job after revenue plummeted from the half-million dollar mark in 2023. Daniel Hart, of the aforementioned site, continues to write and maintain the site, which just about pays for itself at a cost of $2,000 a month. His site has gone from 20 freelance writers and 3 million monthly active users to basically just him and his partners writing and 300,000 MAUs.
At first, “I was super angry, super depressed; I’ve kind of just made peace with it, because life’s too short,” Hart told AMO. He’s going to try to create a subscription or membership service of some kind as a last ditch attempt at surviving, but he’s pretty much lost all hope.
How To Game Google—Or Not
Getting visibility on Google has turned into a billion-dollar business with search engine optimization—ie, making your website attractive enough so it ranks high on a results page—requisite to having a thriving company. Google doesn’t want to be gamed, it wants quality results. Nonetheless, strategies and strategists have proliferated in helping companies climb the search ranks.
“After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, [search quality raters] identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T,” Google said. “Of these aspects, trust is most important.
Search quality raters are people who tell the company if its algorithms seem to be providing good results.
In September 2023, Google rolled out a “Helpful Content Update,” which was the beginning of the end for many web publishers. The HCU is supposed to improve the content that is considered valuable to users by prioritizing high-quality, user-first material and de-emphasizing content created solely for search engine optimization, according to Boomcycle Digital Marketing.
The system may not be quite working as well as expected as independent creators of original content have lost credibility in the eyes of the algorithm.
The quality of Google search results is generating “a little more pessimism that they’re actually doing a great job with what’s being shown in the results. Like, are these actually the best results being rewarded?” That’s according to Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media, which helps websites “drive organic growth with SEO, content marketing and PR.” Given the increasingly unimpressive results on Google and the advent of AI, Siege Media is pivoting from being SEO-focused, and is considering acquiring a social media agency or adding a podcast studio with the creation of premium content the new goal.
“I don’t think search is going to die. I think it’s going to change. It’ll shrink, probably,” Hudgens told AMO. They’re also being pickier with who they are working with, focusing on strong brands, and becoming far more conservative on providing projections to clients. “You don’t know what the future is going to look like, but increasingly, you just want to have extra projections from a risk mitigation point of view.”
Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, told the 20 creators on multiple occasions this week: “Your content is not the reason you lost traffic, it’s phenomenal,” Daugette wrote in a post. Sullivan also said, ““This may purely just be a Google problem, and nothing to do with your sites or your content.”
There is also the notion that only smaller and independent publishers are getting hit by Google, but at least one large New York-based, privately-held legacy publisher of magazines and newspapers is reportedly in a panic as traffic has plunged in 2024, according to a person familiar who didn’t want to be identified for fear of repercussions.
There was also a disagreement over whether Google penalizes entire sites, which it claims not to do.
“In my eyes, there is a sitewide classifier. There is no other explanation for the sitewide hits that our sites have taken,” Daugette wrote. “This is one point that continues to lead me to believe that Google’s Search Team has somewhat ‘lost control’ of the systems that are in place. There is absolutely some level of sitewide classifier in place – I’d understand if individual pages dropped out of Search – but losing 200,000 keywords over the last 2 years doesn’t signify a ‘page-level’ classifier being the reality.”
According to a blog post by Tyler, at the event, “many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night.
[Google’s chief search scientist] continued insisting this didn’t happen and then looked confused that anyone would disagree with him.
When asked what was wrong with our sites, as if we were jilted lovers in an abusive relationship being kicked to the curb, one Googler actually said ‘it’s not you it’s me.’”
Pandu Nayak, Throwing in the Towel
Mark Hardaker has been writing outdoor product reviews for 17 years. He’s also a professional athlete, as are his team of writers. Last year, Mountain Weekly News was the best ever with almost $250,000 in revenue.
“My growth to $250,000 took 17 years. The drop in traffic and revenue took days,” Hardaker wrote ahead of the Google conference.
After the event, Hardaker posted again, quoting Pandu Nayak, vice president of search at Google: “I am very very sorry for you, this is not great at all. I can’t also give you any guarantees about recovery or not, I think that would not be responsible for me to say this. Because I can’t tell what is going to happen. It’s just the unfortunate state of how we operate here… Our goal is to surface great content for users. I suspect there is a lot of great content you guys are creating that we are not surfacing to our users, but I can’t give you any guarantees unfortunately.”
While there was appreciation that Google listened to their stories, there was also very little hope coming out of the conference.
“I’ve decided to pivot away from creating written content,” Kylie Neuhaus, publisher of travel blog Between England & Everywhere, wrote in a post after the event. “My sites will be live, but I won’t be creating anything new. It takes a lot of time to create a blog post and if it doesn’t pay me anymore, I need to focus my efforts elsewhere on something that does (luckily I have my online teaching to fall back on).”
Neuhas is turning to video content, which takes less time to create, though she’s not sure about monetizing it and feels like she’s starting from scratch.
Nate Hake, a travel blogger who also went to Mountain View, concluded that: “Realistically, as I’ve said since the spring, I think most creators are best assuming Google will never fix anything and adjusting your business strategies appropriately.”
