#346 – Hot or Not? Test Your HCU Radar

Welcome to the Authority Hacker Podcast.

In today’s episode, we are playing Google update roulette together with Mark.

This is a simple but very fun game for SEO-ness.

Everyone else will think you’re a dork, but SEOs are going to love it.

And the rules are very simple.

I give you a URL and you have three minutes to open it, look at the site and decide if it went up or down with the recent Google update.

You are not allowed to use any SEO tools to look at recent trends, backlinks or traffic, just your gut feeling, clicking around and Googling things.

In this episode, I played with Mark, but it would be really fun if you joined us, counted your points and told us what your score is in the comments.

And if you’re not interested in playing, don’t worry.

There are some learnings for you to get in this episode as well, because each of the examples that we are going through is symptomatic of a major change that we’ve seen with the August 2024 core update.

And we’ll go through a short analysis of what happened and other sites that have seen these changes too, once we reveal the answer for each website.

So whether you’re looking to play with us or you just want to know what has changed with the recent Google update, there is something for you in this episode.

Before we get started, I want to thank Search Intelligence who is sponsoring this episode.

If you need high quality backlinks built through cutting-edge digital PR campaigns, check out search-intelligence.co.uk.

More on them later.

For now, let’s get started.

So let’s get started with the first site.

I’m just going to share the URL with you, Mark.

You open it and you have three minutes to decide whether this site went up or down in this update.

So the website is vacuumwars.com.

And as you will see, it’s a bit of a classic review site.

Like even though Luke is classic, I would say.

Yeah.

So first, like straight out of the bat, my Spidey sense says that this went down because it doesn’t look great.

Now, let’s do a little bit more research and let’s actually read it.

But just on first impressions alone, it’s not good.

It looks a little bit sort of PowerPoint clip art kind of vibes.

Okay.

Yeah.

How’s the video done, vibe?

Yeah.

It’s not looking good.

Now, what I’m looking at most in a vacuum website is going to be product in hand type reviews.

So let’s look at best robot vacuum cleaners.

You and I both have robot vacuum cleaners.

So we know a thing or two about that.

Yeah.

So immediately- I love it.

I’m sorry.

Immediately, I’m seeing your standard affiliate table at the top, which isn’t a promising sign.

Generally speaking, sites which looked like affiliate sites tended not to fare so well over the last 12 months or so.

Okay.

The photos here, in fact, they actually look like they’re all in the same studio, perhaps.

So that could be a thing.

That could be promising.

Is it a background that gives that to you?

It is, but maybe it’s photoshopped or something.

Let’s dig a little deeper into this.

Okay.

So they’ve got their first section, Halley Tester Vacuum Cleaners.

Okay.

It’s a little bit unclear the image there.

You know what I don’t like about this is how heavy it is to read.

Think about user experience.

Look at that six line first paragraph.

That’s super wide.

So it’s not too bad, right?

The text is broken up by sections, by images.

It’s not too heavy.

These paragraphs are a bit longer, but that can also be indicative of higher brow content.

Okay.

So this image here, the airflow test, they’ve got a couple of vacuums and they’ve got, looks like some kind of suction gauge or amateur or something plugged into it.

You have one more minute, by the way.

I mean, looks great.

They’ve got their map of- What tells you they didn’t steal the images though?

Well, I don’t know that for sure.

This does remind me a little bit of modern castle, another similar sort of website.

So that’s always a possibility.

But if I put myself in the shoes of someone at Google coming to review this site, right?

It looks pretty legit on first impressions.

If I only have 60 seconds to go through it, I’m getting quite positive signals from reading this.

Even though you didn’t like the homepage very much and the top of the page as well, which is quite important.

That is very, very true.

That’s very true.

Bad first impression, but it got better over time.

I mean, it looks like a, doesn’t look like a cookie cutter affiliate review.

It looks like something of more substance.

This is like a, for me, my impression is a high quality product in hand review.

Now I would need to read the entire thing to really gauge that.

We don’t have time for that.

But we don’t have time for that, do we?

So you need to answer the question now, actually.

In this last year, so it’s like that includes the last HSU, that includes whatever corrupt dates happen.

I remember we had two or three corrupt dates in a row after that.

A lot of our movements, even outside of updates in the last year and then the April update.

Like I need to go.

I have to go.

You need to say it’s up or down.

It’s down.

It’s down.

It’s down.

All right.

We’re switching to my screen now, Matt.

And if you look at it at the one year thing, it’s like one year ago, this site had 2098 visits and today it has 143,752 visits.

So it’s a massive increase over one year, actually.

Like the site has gone up significantly.

It’s interesting because like the biggest player in that space, Modern Castle, who I was comparing it to, they’ve actually gone down quite a lot over the last year.

I know.

And it’s not like they’re recovered.

Like the site exists for a while, right?

You can see like there was always some traffic to this site, but they’ve gone up much.

It’s not like it’s crazy.

What was the date that it spiked up?

Like the real big spike.

Was that the recent core update?

Yeah.

August 24 core update.

And look at just skyrocketing.

And the keywords are not, you know, a lot of people went up in either base, but it’s bullshit keywords.

Like this is not bullshit keywords.

The number one keyword is best robot vacuum, best tick vacuum, best coldest vacuum, etc.

They rank number one for a lot of very, very, very lucrative keywords.

So they’re actually banking right now.

Now, why do you think that is?

Content quality?

Like is this stolen?

You mentioned something you’ve had before.

It’s not stolen.

But vacuum walls on YouTube has 322,000 subscribers.

They have, they’re very popular.

They have videos with 2.7 million views from three years ago, where he has like all these robot vacuums essentially fighting with each other in a big area now or something.

And if you check them on, if you check vacuum walls as a keyword, you can see on Ahrefs, they have 3,400 searches per month, which tells me they have a very strong brand as a small creator.

And Google has loved this in the last update, as we saw in the overview.

You can see that essentially there’s skyrocketing, which is quite interesting.

And it’s quite similar to the website from Lucy that I interviewed in the podcast a few weeks ago.

She also does not have a great site.

Like let me actually open this.

Like if you go to the blog or to the lesson, there’s really, it’s not great.

Like it’s pretty basic and it’s like, I can’t even find the blog.

Where’s the blog?

I don’t even know.

But she has blog posts that are not very good.

But still, if you check her Ahrefs, you will see that she also bumped up with the update.

And what that tells me is that prolific creators on other platforms, you know, look like they got, it’s just two examples, but there are more examples that I found.

Big prolific creators with this update look like they got a fair boost with, with, you know, recent updates basically.

And they’re all up here on here.

You can see Lucy a year ago was at 2,300, very similar to Vacuum Wars and today she’s at 58,800.

So yeah, it’s interesting because it’s a review site because, you know, that’s the kind of archetype that people are like, oh, they went down for sure.

They got killed by Google, etc.

Not at all.

They’re actually banking like crazy better than they ever have in the case of Vacuum War.

So that’s the first one.

So I guess I get one point for you failing on this one.

All right.

Your turn.

Okay.

So your website is bettabox.com.

Okay, let’s check it out.

Bettabox.com is a Siamese fighting fish, I think they’re called.

Yeah, I’ve seen that.

I’ve seen aquarium sites before, like we actually have it.

So first thing I see, login and sign up.

So it’s more than just a content site.

That’s what I’m telling.

It’s telling me already.

Like they actually have something where you can sign up.

So if I click on sign up immediately, like I can see that they have a membership.

But it’s just how video series on how to set a beta tank take care of your beta.

What’s included?

Okay.

So this is pretty bare bones, the sales page.

And that tells me this is probably brand new slash I’m trying to add a business model to my website because I got fucked by Google updates.

This is kind of like the vibe I’m getting.

Oh, Ecommerce is ranking very well.

You should have some businesses to your website.

That feels like it.

Because the rest of the site, even if you look at the navigation, the navigation is very much like an affiliate site.

It’s like a bunch of info articles and reviews.

So it looks like this was just added recently.

Even the main CTA is not trying to sell the product.

It’s trying to send you to affiliate reviews, which tells me they’re not very confident in their products.

So my guess is they don’t really believe in it, although there is more on the homepage about this.

So let’s go into some content like minimum tank size.

What’s the minimum tank size for better keeping the beta adequately sized?

I like that the writing is not too heavy.

I don’t like that.

Literally, we’re talking about fish tank sizes.

And it takes me like five screens of scrolling to see an image.

It looks like an original image though.

I could right click it and then search image with Google.

And then that’s going to do a lens search.

It’s trying to search everything, but just this box.

Sorry, but if I do this, I could see, is it taken from somewhere else?

But no, it looks like it’s actually an original image in this case.

You tell me when I can’t decide anymore.

Yeah, okay.

This is a custom image.

It’s kind of like, it’s the custom image from wish.com.

It’s pretty low effort.

But I mean, it could still have done okay.

Like I imagine you have some curve, but let’s check their socials.

I would imagine Pinterest is their main thing. 427 followers, so not very big.

They’ve done some Pinterest, but they don’t have that many pins.

No way, this is a decent traffic source for them.

Let’s check Instagram maybe.

Instagram, Facebook might be big. 716 followers, not enough to matter.

Okay, so based on your first impression, what do you think?

They don’t.

What do you think?

Like crazy.

They think like crazy.

Yeah.

Well, I can reveal to you that that’s not the case at all.

They’ve actually gone up.

In fact, they’ve been almost completely affected.

If you look at their traffic graph for the last two years in Ahrefs, it’s up from 10k two years ago to 15k now.

There’s been a few ups and downs.

Okay, but it’s still small.

It’s still small, yeah.

But you could not point to me and tell me when any of the HCU core updates occur on this graph, because it’s relatively stable.

Now, what is interesting, if we go back further, we can see that back in 2020, they had this big spike.

Now, that may have been because pandemic, fish, everyone doing these types of things at home.

I don’t know, but that’s certainly worth bearing in mind.

So one interesting takeaway, looking at the Ahrefs top pages list, is that a lot of the keywords they’re ranking for doesn’t seem to be the keyword that the page is targeting.

So their top page, according to Ahrefs, is this tank mate.

So better tank mates.

Advice on choosing tank mates, so other fish to put in your tank with your better.

And the keyword they rank for is can better fish live with snails?

And the snails part’s a really small part further down the article.

And it fascinates me that you look at this article here, and it just looks bad.

This is AI generated.

They have massive spaces between the bullet points, and it’s not formatted very well.

It doesn’t read well.

But it is short, and it does get straight to the point.

And that’s a– I disagree.

I think the problem is I checked the top pages.

I’m not checking Ahrefs before, but in this case, there’s only 40 pages in the top pages.

So they obviously don’t fall into that scaled content, et cetera.

If they put 500 pages on their site, I guarantee you they tank, for example.

Because Google has been catching people who have scaled up that content massively.

And then when you do that small scale, it looks like it’s not really affecting you as much.

It’s almost like you’re not even being considered yet.

But to me, this doesn’t look like someone has done some keyword research and planned everything out in a very thorough way.

They’ve just written about a bunch of stuff that they know about to do with the topic.

So I’m getting like this isn’t really an SEO type slide from it.

I don’t think it’s even active.

Unless they’re running ads, their product, there’s no way with that level of traffic they’re making enough money to sustain anything.

So it looks like a dead site to me, even though they haven’t been hit by the updates.

And it’s so few pages, it doesn’t matter too much.

One other interesting thing, I noticed that quite a few of their blog posts are quite short.

So they’ve got this one on DropSee, which is I guess some type of fish, but it’s 623 words.

Yeah, but it sounds like something you get out of a single prompt from AI, kind of like this kind of word count.

It’s more or less what you could get on like, write me an article about this.

Yeah, this one here on do betta fish need a light is 583 words.

This is an affiliate review, but it does not look like an affiliate review.

If you were far away without your glasses on, you would not be able to tell this was an affiliate review article.

I’m telling you, in my opinion, it hasn’t even been considered by these updates because it’s too small as a site.

Like it’s too few pages.

That’s my guess.

Yeah, but at the same time, they do rank for all of these different keywords related to the topic.

It kind of feels like they’re this somewhat specialist focused on one type of fish.

And maybe like there’s not too many other sites out there focusing on that one type of fish that they’re considered.

I disagree.

They’re missing lots of keywords.

Like it’s just it hasn’t scaled yet.

This side and they got like a few keywords.

That’s my guess.

Anyway, you have the point here.

So I’ll give you my next website, which is a site that we’ve seen before in the podcast called senseporter.com.

It’s a travel review site where the guy reviews flights.

And I’m not going to give you context that what happened to this site because that could help you.

But so like what happened before.

So you have to remember.

So I kind of sure remember what happened before with this guy.

But some kind of coming at this blind.

But first impressions, it looks like every other travel blog of person that reviews flights, airline seats, these types of things.

It looks pretty decent, to be honest.

I mean, all these are all these photos are taken by him on the flight that he took.

There’s a map.

There’s him at the airport and the photos.

It is quite a heavy ad layout.

Not crazy, but pretty, pretty heavy.

It’s kind of on the sidebar in the middle.

We’ve got this bar at the bottom.

Yeah, it’s not loading.

Maybe the ad blocks.

Media line, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s it looks like a travel blog.

It looks like a standard airline travel blog.

And it’s it’s okay.

Yeah.

If I was super into this stuff, might be interested by I kind of feel like this type of content probably does better on YouTube these days.

Is it helpful?

Like, would you like, would you call it helpful?

Like, I mean, if I so the page I’m looking at now, Singapore Airlines, 777, 300 ER business class.

If I was about to fly in that flight and I wanted to know what it was like coming to here, I feel like it would be helpful.

Yeah, I got a view of all the features of seats, the food, what the experience is like.

It’s pretty good, to be honest, pretty photo heavy, which I like, honestly, for this.

But the consequence of that is that, yeah, there’s actually not that much, really not that much text at all in here.

I think the ratio of images to the text is super high.

Is it too much?

I mean, it depends what you’re coming here for.

Right.

If I want to just get a feel for what this is like, and I’m scrolling through it, like I am right now, I’m not reading any of the text, but I’m still getting the gist of what his experience was like, which was pretty cool.

Yeah, I like it personally.

It was like a comic book.

And it may, it may even be faster to come here and scroll through that than it would be to go watch like a seven minute YouTube video of someone’s experience and click through it.

So I like it.

He’s got comments in his, got his comments in here as well.

See trip report index.

That’s just all his flights.

He’s taken a flight log about, I mean, yeah, it means his fault was all over it.

It seems good.

Like I can’t see why this would go down if it was right before, other than like SERPs being re-arranged.

I would say this is, I wouldn’t say it’s gone off.

I would say this is stable.

You say stable.

Okay.

Let’s check out Ahrefs.

Of course it’s reloading.

This is what happened in the last year.

So we’re looking at a massive drop when, when was that March that it kicked off?

Yeah.

So that’s interesting.

It’s like, yeah, March, 2024 core updates started.

It was more or less stable before that.

But then there was a big drop off there.

And if you put two years as well, you see he was growing like from September 2022 to July, 2023, he went from 25k traffic to 95k traffic.

So that was pretty good.

And then the March core update destroyed him from essentially 80k.

So he went down a bit by then all the way down to 8,500.

And then the August core update put him up a little bit, but like, that’s why that gives context to quote unquote, HSU recoveries or like core recoveries here, because he went from 8,500 all the way to 14,000, which is still. 50% traffic increase, but it’s still, you can barely see the increase on the line when you zoom out to two years.

So a year ago, he was at 93k.

So that’s definitely a way that and that shows you how Google can’t make their mind over the span of two years.

Right.

It’s like they went from like, oh, this side is great.

Let me give them more traffic to like, it’s fine.

And then March core update.

Do you have any idea why Google deems this to be non helpful content?

I mean, okay.

Yeah.

So it’s interesting.

This is you can’t really do much better than what this guy’s done.

And not only that, but he’s actually popular on YouTube as well.

And so that’s kind of like a counterpoint to my first example where I showed you like, Oh, big creators are doing well.

If you’re not too big of a creator, like this guy has 50k subscribers and you know, his videos get like 10k views.

Like it’s okay, but he’s not like a huge creator.

Like he’s a small creator and it shows that Google probably struggles a lot more to identify creators around that because probably his brain search is not as big, etc.

And so that doesn’t work that well.

And same on Instagram, right?

He’s actually okay on Instagram.

I mean, he’s small Instagram.

Sorry.

He’s 4,000 subscribers on Instagram.

So it’s like, you can see he’s a small scales creator.

And what’s interesting is I found like multiple sites that were in this category.

So for example, I found this quote unquote midlife live, like midlife lifestyle kind of blog where again, like this is super original.

You can see like she shares kind of like travel and stories, kind of a mom blog, but like real, you know, and then same thing.

It’s like the URL found it’s grownupdish.com.

And it’s like, it’s not amazing, but you know, she does YouTube.

She does all of that, etc.

And if you check, she, she, she’s in the same small creator thing and look at what happened to her as well.

Like if we’re looking at one year, she actually went up with the marsh core update.

She went from 5,000 to 14,000 all the way to 30,000.

And then during the August 2024 core update, she went all the way back down to 1,400.

It shows like Google for small creators still can’t figure it out.

It’s still too middle ground because like these people are real.

It feels like with these two sites, like they would be candidates for, you know, potential recoveries in future.

Do you think if there’s some recalibration?

Yeah, that’s the thing is like Google figures that that one is quite obvious at this point, but what it’s, it’s in between then they’re, they’re, they’re really struggling.

So that was kind of the story of this one is like, you can be a genuine blogger and creator, not just they can be on YouTube.

You can be all that if you’re not big, like vacuum was is like Lucy’s, for example, it might not be of use to Google and you might get rocked by updates the exact same way as your bros are getting rocked.

And so that’s, that’s, that’s what I learned from, from this example.

So that’s, that’s mine.

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And now back to the episode.

Okay, I’ll give you your next one.

It’s spendmenot.com.

Okay, let me put it in my browser and check it out.

You can count the time.

Okay, so booking and accounting national debt.

So basically, yes, your first impressions above the fold, like positive nights.

So it’s the spacing is not perfect.

It’s like it’s a not tiny site, but it’s still amateurish.

Like this gradient in the header is horrible.

The spacing between like, you know, for example, that the fact that there’s the same amount of space between the category, the title and the description here, it’s not correct.

Normally the title should be closer to the description.

Like there’s a little bit of like, design rules that are not followed.

These featured images, like, you know, they’re cut halfway through, etc.

So you can see it’s like, it’s a bit amateurish.

It’s not their first version of their site, but it’s not super well built.

And if I open a piece of content, like you can see they follow mostly good practices.

They don’t have a review by or something, but you know, they have last updated, which has been not always a good thing recently.

But like, the problem is like the keyword, right?

How to buy business stock sounds very, very generic to me.

Like, good luck ranking for that.

And then it’s like, again, the introduction is like, I’m here to buy stocks.

And they tell me, they tell me about childhood dreams and whatever.

Like, it’s like, I don’t give a shit. – It’s like, yeah, it’s like, I’m here to buy a stock, man.

It’s like, just give me what I’m here for.

And it’s like, yeah, same.

It’s like, oh, like Disney released a Snow White and a Seven Dwarves in 1937.

I’m here to buy a stock.

I don’t care.

Just like, you’re telling me all this stuff, like the IPO, the forecast, it’s super fluffy.

Like, I can tell you right away, they’re bullshitting me.

It’s like, there’s not a single section.

Okay.

Like, okay, how to buy business stock.

Like, we arrive, like how many screens did I have to scroll to get how to buy the stock? – It’s half way down the page. – Even more. – And it’s a long page. – Look at the bar.

It’s almost two thirds, right?

So like, to get to the answer.

So it’s bad content.

Let’s check the about us permission.

We had this good time.

They might be going up though.

It’s like, I could see a site like this recovering right now.

Okay, no gravitas, but you know. – So we’re just looking at the people on the about page.

And, you know, the first person doesn’t have a photo of them. – Let’s search some images with Google as well.

Okay, now that’s real.

Like, I’m just trying to find people who might be stock photos, but I don’t think they are stock photos actually.

Subscribe now.

What do I subscribe to?

If I click on subscribe now, it takes me to the about page.

Yeah, it’s not a great site.

I can see how they’re trying to do great, but it’s like, how much does it cost to have a baby?

Okay, and the keywords are like, it’s poor.

So I mean, I think this site deserves to go down, but I would not, because there’s some hints of like something put together decently, my guess is it went down for the last year, but had some slight recovery with the recent August update with along with a lot of sites that saw some recovery.

That would be my guess. – That’s almost exactly right.

They went down.

So this is the one year traffic graph.

So they’re actually, they went down in September last year, but they’re actually higher now than they were in September.

After going to almost zero, they were down to 181 traffic on the 10th of August, 12th of August, and they’re back up to 20,000 almost on the 10th of September, a month later. – How about two years? – Yeah, if we zoom out, you can see that. – Okay, here we go. – They did fall from grace like much earlier, but they had this massive spike in 2022, and then they had this massive fall in late 2022, back down to like 10, 11,000. – So they’re far from the all-time high traffic. – Far, but their all-time high was somewhat of an anomaly.

They’re back to where they were before they started ascending towards that all-time high. – Okay, well, it’s still like three years back or something. – Yeah, what is interesting though, is this I think is a classic case of scaled content.

Let’s take a look at some of their top pages.

So six out of their top 10 pages follow this format. $18 an hour is how much a year, $19 is how much a year.

It’s a separate article, another article, $20 is how much a year, $21 is how much a year.

These are all in their top 10 articles, and they’re all published in July of this year, just two, three months ago.

And they’re all ranking and they’re all getting traffic, which baffles me. – It’s interesting.

So it’s not old content recovering, it’s new content ranking. – New content, yeah. – Okay, and it’s like, yeah, so it’s almost like, yeah, HU going page level, old pages, maybe old pages are quote unquote penalized still, but new pages haven’t gone through the filter or something like that, and they get to rank.

I don’t know, it’s pretty weird, but seeing as I like this rank, sorry, go ahead. – What is interesting about it, and I looked at the SERPs for these and they’re mostly calculators from job sites.

They’ll have a, you input your salary and it’ll work out what your take home pay is.

So eight out of the 10 results in the SERPs were these calculators.

Two out of the 10 were blog posts, one being spend me not, and the other being a big jobs website had a post on it.

So actually, if you’re coming just to get the answer to this question, this blog post does a pretty good job of doing it.

Like the time to value is very low.

You write at the start of the article, yeah, you figure out what the salary is, then the take home is explained to what taxes are, the take home, how much it is weekly, final thoughts.

Like it’s a short article, it gives you the information.

You’re in and out in 10 seconds if you want your information.

So Google is doing a good job in that sense.

I agree, it’s not a great site, but I don’t want eight calculators.

I don’t want 10 calculators.

I do want a few, but there’s this concept of like the SERP being split up into different blocks and like some of them will be blog posts, some of them will be e-com, some of them will be tools or whatever.

And it seems like something like that’s happening here and that’s why they’ve been allowed back in.

Searching is changing, you’re competing within your category of content and then you cannot write, like you’re competing for three spots on the SERP basically.

And that’s about it.

Yeah, I think also like, unlike the page that I checked, like how to buy a distance stock is like, it took me like two serves of the page to actually get the answer.

Like actually the pages that seem to rank are giving the answer above the fold.

And it’s much faster.

And if you’re on a cell phone or a tablet, small device, then you don’t have to scroll like give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome or whatever scrolling to get to the actual answers right there at the top.

Yeah, okay, fair enough.

Well, I think it’s like, I think this is interesting because this really sets the bar.

Like a lot of people are like, “Oh, I see who’s dead, it doesn’t work anymore,” etc.

Like this is not an amazing site yet.

They’re doing okay.

I mean, they’re doing okay.

They’re doing better.

And if they keep doing what they’re doing, hopefully the traffic will kind of come back to an acceptable level.

Like it’s not going to be like the best days ever, but it’s going to be decent.

And that shows that, yeah, I think it is a lot more manageable after this August update than it was before.

Like, it was very comfortable.

No question, no question.

Still, it’s not what it was for sure.

No, it’s not what it was.

I think it’s better than it was a month ago.

I agree.

Okay, let’s jump on to the next one.

And the next one is a bit of a curve ball for you actually, because the next one, I don’t even need to share the URL because it’s diverge.com, which is a really big magazine that has covered a lot of SEO stuff recently, actually.

Like they had an interview with Send a Pichai and so on.

And so, yeah, it’s like you’ve probably seen that site before.

And I just want you to tell me, it’s going to be hard to guess based on the site.

I think you’re going to have to use a bit of a gut feeling here.

Well, I seem to recall we did an Authority Hacker News episode about them losing traffic.

So like based on me following that channel and presenting it, I would say they went down since September.

That was before the August Core update though.

That is true.

Yeah, I don’t know how they did in the August Core update.

Let’s take a look at some of the content.

Obviously, it’s a big site.

It’s very famous.

It’s well regarded.

It’s thought of being pretty good site.

I like them actually.

Let’s take a look.

They’ve got their AirPods 4 hands-on noise canceling review, photo of the AirPods in their hands.

They have this longer paragraphs, but it kind of reminds me a little bit of the wire cutter in the way it’s formatted.

It’s quite like a narrow column of text and images.

It’s got a sidebar here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it looks pretty good.

For their defense, these AirPods were released yesterday.

It’s not a full review.

Yeah, it’s more like an actual more than just a news thing.

Let’s go to the review section and look at some of the more detailed reviews here.

The best Nintendo Switch controllers to buy right now.

Okay.

A lot of ads.

I see a lot of ads.

Huge.

Huge.

If this wasn’t on the Verge, this pink, red, and yellow striped image with the controllers on it, I would think someone made this in paint and it looks a bit amateurish, but it seems to fit quite well in the context of the Verge.

Is that design actually?

Yeah.

Look at the photos of the controller as well.

You will see that they actually make backdrops for them, like scroll down, to the actual photos and you will see they actually make backdrops that are branded to their brand as well.

Interesting.

So it’s like, and you will see they’re actually different for each one.

They make slightly different looking ones.

I mean, just scanning through the text, it looks like there’s a solid editorial behind these reviews.

It looks like they’ve tested everything out.

I mean, it’s not as thorough as a site like ratings.com would be, but they don’t cover.

Or even the VacuumTina site.

Yeah.

Vacuum Wars.

For sure.

It has the vibes of a typical large site that obviously has editorial standards and is doing a decent review, but they will probably get away with a lot more than small sites were because of their size and authority.

Yeah.

So it’s a really tough one.

I’m still going to say down just because I seem to remember something bad happening about them.

I can’t remember what it was, but based on my impressions alone, I would say this would be rock solid.

All right.

Well, if you actually check the Ahrefs, you will see that compared to a year ago, they went from 7.3 million organic down to 3.8 million organic, which is a big drop.

It is.

It’s almost half.

At the same time, aside from it looks like it’s at the March update, there isn’t any big drop.

There is actually.

It’s something of a gradual.

In May.

No, no.

Look in May as well.

Like there’s a pretty big drop.

They go from May 6th, 8.1 million to May 22nd, 4.5 million.

That’s a pretty big drop.

There is a few drops like that.

Aside from that, though, it doesn’t look like your typical small site, which is affected by this in terms of there’s an obvious point.

It got hit and then it just went down and kept going down.

Even after you pointed out it got hit, there’s a couple of big upswings and traffic immediately afterwards before it went back down again.

So it’s an unusual pattern, I would say.

But if you’re a shareholder, you’re worried right now.

And the reason I picked this site is because I wanted to show that it’s not just small sites that are being affected by this.

The Verge is a well-known website.

Senator Pichai, the CEO of Google, was interviewed on The Verge, for example, recently.

They do big things like they can’t really make it much bigger in terms of tech reporting.

And then their traffic is almost half over a year, according to Edge.

So it’s like, take this with a grain of salt.

It’s a big drop.

And the CEO of The Verge has been, the CEO, the editor in Ship Story, has been really complaining about the fact that they believe that at one point they’re going to hit what they call Google Zero, which is a point where Google just sends no traffic to websites anymore.

And it’s quite interesting to see how critical they’ve been to Google recently when you look at their situation as well.

What’s interesting is they’re not the only big sites.

So for example, I looked at Node Wallet, Node Wallet big credit card review site.

And again, if you look over one year, they went from 21 million visitors to 15 million visitors.

That’s a 20, more than 25% drop in one year.

That’s a lot.

It’s not like the 80% you see, but these are public companies, like Traded, et cetera.

So it’s a big deal.

It’s a lot of money they’ve lost as well.

Similar with at look at verywellfit.com, which is one of these about.com, dot dash meridits properties.

And again, a year ago, it was at 4.4 million.

And today it’s at 3.1 million.

Again, you’re looking at losing a third of your traffic.

And you can see the common story is it’s kind of like a slow gradual drop over time rather than big updates shaking their lives.

But it’s still significant.

These businesses, they’re going to be revamped.

People are going to get fired.

They’re going to change things over that.

And the story here is that small sites are not the only ones suffering.

All the publishing world is suffering.

And you know, my gut feeling is this is traffic lost to Reddit and things like that.

What you’re seeing is the erosion of their traffic is the growth of Reddit.

There’s another thing going on here as well.

I think the sites we look at when we talk about big sites, by definition, they’re the biggest sites.

And to an extent, when you get that big, there’s sometimes only one direction you can go.

If you start with zero traffic, you can’t lose any traffic.

But if you start with all the traffic, hard to gain much more past a certain point without going into like reviewing vitamins like CNET did and just some weird, you know, going outside of your top player.

How do you see that do actually?

I’m just going to check CNET.

Sorry.

I’m just curious.

Yeah, they’re done also.

Over one year.

It looks like 5.

Oh, no, no, no.

That’s fairly flat. 17 to 20.

So they’re a little bit up.

But yeah, overall, it’s like all I just wanted to say is like small sites are not the only ones suffering from Google, but they suffer differently.

It’s more silent.

It’s more gradual.

But it’s a big deal.

Like over one year, like losing 25 to 33% of your traffic is a huge deal for publication like that.

And that happens to everyone.

And that’s just in my opinion, it’s kind of like a symptom of how information flows these days and search just being less important than it was a few years ago.

There probably is some erosion to search volume as well.

What do you think, how do you think the Verge would have done if we gave all the traffic that Reddit and Quora got from it back to the Verge?

They’d probably be like flat, I would say, something like this.

I think it’s still difficult to grow as a publication on the web today.

It’s just like it’s a medium that’s like not as many people read websites, they prefer social sites, et cetera.

But like they’ll probably be flat.

Well, if you mix that, you add AI overviews, you add all the new search features, you add Reddit ranking on top, then these publications are also suffering.

And the earning goals, a lot of people talk about that actually.

They work a lot on CRO to offset that.

And that’s an opportunity that we’ve talked about in our previous podcast, by the way, on how we use AI to get more leads.

We actually get more leads on AutoEacker now, then we’re a bit down in traffic and we still get more leads now because we worked on CRO actually.

So it’s something that these big sites are doing as well.

Let’s jump on to our next one.

Yeah, so your next one is nomadicmats.com.

I know this side.

I mean, I know this side, but I don’t know what happened.

So for context, he’s one of the OG travel influencers before influencers was even a word.

I can remember 15 years ago reading this guy’s blog.

Isn’t it the guy who like, oh, it’s not the guy who did the dancing videos everywhere.

No, that’s someone else.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, I’m checking the site.

I like that there’s a search engine.

Like if I type Budapest, here, what happens?

Is it just a search?

Okay, it’s just search.

It’s not something crazy.

I think it looks good.

I just don’t like very wide content areas.

I find them difficult to read.

It looks like a classic blog post though, like table of content, the map, photo of such an IBA.

And then a list of things to do.

You know, this size, I’m thinking of travel lemming.

Like they got murdered when they made lists of places, but not necessarily because their rankings went down, but because Google has these new kind of like search snippets that shows the list of things to do in a city above organic results.

And so it’s possible that their rankings show that they’re stable, but their traffic is down massively.

How does he make money?

So he has courses.

What are his courses?

Okay.

How to make money blocking.

Fair enough, to be honest.

That’s one of the ways to do that.

He also has books and like some other things, destination guides, I think, as well.

He sells.

Yeah.

Okay.

So he has a bit of a business attached to…

So it’s one of these cases where like, I feel like he has a business attached to his site, but I don’t know if it’s big enough to generate enough user metrics to make any difference.

You know what I mean?

It’s like a lot of people, they think that adding an e-come to their site is what’s going to fix it.

When really, I think what changes things is like people, like it’s the branded search, the interest around the product, like people looking for reviews around your product, people looking for your refund policy, people doing all that stuff.

I think that’s what matters, not necessarily this.

And it’s like, I mean, he does sell his books physically as well.

So it’s like, maybe there’s a little bit of that, but I’m not big enough on traveling.

Let’s check his socials.

I think socials will help me.

So 150K on Instagram, which is pretty good.

He’s not on YouTube.

How big is he on TikTok?

He has not been on TikTok, 2,500.

And then I guess, yeah.

So my guess is he went down a lot, even though he’s a good site, because travel has suffered so much with these updates, even though that site is okay.

It’s okay, but like the B.com page wasn’t mind blowing either.

Well, yeah, you’re right.

He did go down massively over the last year.

So this is the one year.

And it’s, I think it was the, it was in December actually, he had his first kind of like downwards period.

And then it just kept going down from there.

March core update, again, a noticeable drop.

And then it just kept going down and down and down and down.

It’s flattened off a bit, but there is no upwards activity in the August core update.

Now he does still have 170,000 visits.

So it’s not crazy.

It’s not.

I mean, like he’s down from an all time high of 450,000.

So yeah, it hasn’t been going great, I would say.

It’s interesting you mentioned about branded search though, because he is one of the top travel influencers or bloggers.

He has 2,300, like his name, his blog name, Nomadic Matt has 2,300 monthly search volume, according to Ahrefs.

It’s okay, but it’s not huge.

Like it’s some brands, but it’s not big enough to make up for it.

And in general in the travel space, what has happened is like the bloggers that talk about everywhere, like every location have been destroyed while the people who focus on one location have done better.

So it’s like the format of his blog is that it was primed to get fucked by the updates, basically.

And so like it feels like it’s one of these cases where it doesn’t feel it’s like however good you are, you probably had no chance.

Yeah.

You know, like reading through some of his content, this substance is good.

Like he’s been to these places and he’s giving advice on it, but it just has that vibe.

Like you look through it, is this a stock image?

I don’t know.

Yeah, he has.

It’s hard to tell because his imagery looks quite stocky, even though it might not be.

It’s old stuff.

Heavy ads.

It’s quite old.

I was reading through, I think it was at the time.

Look at the laptops.

Like if you look at my screen, look at the laptops.

Like this guy is holding a laptop from like 15 years ago.

Like it’s like, you know what I mean?

But this is also, this is the problem when you have an old site like this.

I mean, he’s been doing it for 17 years and like that now.

So it’s a challenge, right, to keep stuff updated.

Yeah.

I was having a look through the Thailand travel guide and it was talking about like how to get around in Chiang Mai and it was like mentioned taxis and tuk-tuks and all that stuff.

And then there was a small section of that grab and Uber at the very end, which felt like it had been kind of stuck in there.

But that’s how everybody gets around these days.

So it’s a lot of outdated content probably, but I think regardless of what he would have done, the update would have like, it’s really a category that like, you had almost no chance to do well with the updates.

I want to ask you something because you were looking through his socials and he had 150,000 on Instagram, but only two and a half thousand on TikTok.

On Facebook, he has 276,000.

Okay.

Facebook ads.

So to me, no, it’s old to me that tells me it’s old, right?

And you look at a recent post and he gets five, six likes.

So it’s like he does not super active anymore.

He built his social a while ago and now it’s kind of dead, which is why his brand search doesn’t reflect the size of these audiences.

I’m also just curious, maybe it’s just like the business was a business for the 2010s, not the 2020s, the way it’s done.

Like the lack of YouTube, like people really want to see that when they’re viewing travel content these days.

It’s important.

And shorts.

I mean, like short videos, like it’s like you have to do that.

It’s so different now.

It’s how it has changed completely.

It’s like, it’s a challenge.

Like it’s much more difficult to adapt an existing business to these kinds of changes than it is to start a new one.

And we feel it with Zottori Hacker quite often, for example, like this podcast, this format, like we’re showing our screen, we’re just, we’re changing things a little bit.

It’s just us attempting to do what he should have done with his site, which is kind of like adapting to the new formats that people are consuming, actually.

Okay.

Why does that take us in terms of points?

Right.

Because I think that was the last one.

So I won the first one with vacuum walls.

Your second one I lost.

So you had, it’s one, one.

The next one was the third one was a sense barter, which I think you got wrong as well.

So that’s two, one.

Yeah.

Yours was what you’re that you’re the champion.

That’s you got the last two, right?

The first one wrong.

So you got the verge right though.

Yeah.

Okay.

But that was kind of the verge was right because I had kind of inside information from authority, which you should subscribe to.

But I feel like just looking at the content alone, I probably wouldn’t have said it gone down so much.

All right.

Cool.

Well, that’s pretty much it for this format.

Let’s know if you like this kind of like more interactive format where we’re just discussing making games, et cetera.

As we say, we’re trying to adapt the format a little bit, try some new things so that we can have different angles on how you view things.

Let us know in the comments and we’ll see you in two weeks for another episode.

Thanks for watching.

Alright.

I hope you enjoyed playing with us.

I’d love to hear what your score is and what you thought of the episode format in the comments.

I think it would be really fun to play this game with big SEOs in the industry like Kyle Roof, et cetera, but I’ll wait to see what you say in the comments.

If you enjoyed this episode and want more free content from us, check out our new free subscriber exclusive video on how to easily generate a hundred dollars or more with affiliate marketing in 2024.

And no, it does not involve ranking review sites.

We know it’s very difficult these days.

So to learn more about it, go on authorityhikertraining.com or click in the link in the description.

And until then, I’ll see you in the next episode.