Is Content Still King After HCU?
As long as there are Yaoi fans chasing CBT Elves with Flamboyant Nipples and Wizard Testicles, it is. 

A Fantasy novelist's thoughts on the Google changes of 2023 and how it has impacted those of us who are real businesses vs the affiliate marketer scam artists

You make something people want, by first satisfying your own need in an area you can not find satisfactory products in, then you start producing that product and marketing it to like minded people like yourself who have that same need.

Take for example the yak cheese dog chews that have flooded the market the past couple of years. If you look at the history of this product, it was invented by two guys who were dissatisfied by the seriously life threatening health hazards of rawhide dog chews. They wanted an alternative to rawhide chews, but at the time, none existed so they set out to create one for their dogs. They ended up inventing the yak cheese dog chews and at first were just making it for their own dogs, but then friends and family wanted some for their dogs, and word of mouth spread, and more people started asking for it, so they started mass producing it and selling it on a small website. Before they knew it they had more demand then they could meet and needed to look into renting a factory to make the product. One thing led to another and they ended up on Shark Tank (TV show) and landed a deal there, getting the help they needed to mass produce. Today about 5 years later, you can not find a store that does NOT sell yak cheese dog chews. Walmart, Target, Amazon, Petsmart, and because they did not have the foresight to patent their invention, there are now dozens of competitors also selling yak cheese dog chews.

This is what you need to do. This is what I did. You need to look at something in YOUR OWN LIFE that you need to fix, invent the product that fixes it, then produce that product and sell it to others who had the same problem you had.

Me? I love Elves. And I love Unicorns. But I hate the mainstream goody two shoes Tolkien Elves who flit around doing nice things and being always good and saving the day, yawn, boooring! I hate the childish toddler friendly chubby goody goody gum drops family friendly Unicorns. Where are the psycho serial killer Elves? Where are the evil flesh eating Unicorns who skewer skulls on their horns and squish victims entrails under their blood drenched hooves? I wanted Elves and Unicorns that were the things of emo edgelord nightmares, but I couldn't find them.

In 1996, I started a blog, to post my frustrations over the desperate lack of evil Elves and evil Unicorns in Fantasy novels. I started posting things like “If I was going to write Elves, I would have this do this…” and soon, I started writing example stories of what Elves SHOULD be like. By 1999 I have over 300 short stories on that blog featuring an evil Elf main character and his evil Unicorn sidekick.

Today? I now have 138 novels, 423 novellas, and more than 2k short stories published featuring those two main characters. One of those novels sold over a million copies.

I was frustrated by a thing I could not find.

After raving and ranting my frustrations, I asked myself, what is stopping me from making the product I can not find?

After sharing for free online the end result of the product I made, random strangers found my blog and commented to request more, because they had been looking for this product as well.

Find a demand, a need, a frustration, and fill it. It really is that simple.

People selling courses, try to make it sound difficult by giving convoluted double talk, that serves only to make you confused, so you buy part two of their course.

But it's not difficult.

Find a demand, a need, a frustration, and fill it. It really is that simple.

Those yak cheese dog chews - those ARE content.

Products you sell, ARE a form of content that people buy.

Those novels that I write - these are content, paperback books ARE a form of content.

Content is king.

If you don't have content, unique to you content, you have no business.

I think far too many people fail to understand what exactly CONTENT is.

>>>Content quality is more important than ever.(sure some might disagree)

I’m not sure if I agree with this or not. I have mixed feelings on the whole content debate. I see people from both sides always making good points, but I’m never seeing any evidence either for or against. Just a lot of speculation on both sides of the debate and no real definite answers.

My own thoughts is, that Google is a bot, so how can it tell if the content is good or not? Maybe it can? I don’t know. I do not have a good solid understanding of what the bots can or can not do, so I just don’t know. I just do not think “content is king” applies to things like crawler bots because I don’t think they are that good at determining the value of content.

I do feel “content is king” still applies from a reader’s point of view. No person wants to read gibberish, after all. No person wants to look at poor images. No person wants to struggle through clutter. No person wants to put on their editor hat and try to figure out what is being said through garbled grammar and misspellings. So, yeah, for the reader/visitor of a site, yes, content is very much still king. So, I am of the mind that making good content for your readers is the best thing to do, because you should care more about how your readers perceive you, shouldn’t you?

But, is “content king” to Google’s bot? That’s a different perspective entirely, and I’m just not sure. I’m seeing some pretty poor content ranking lately, stuff that completely does not match my search intent and is a clusterfuck of clearly respun garbled gibberish that no human ever checked to see if it could even be read. Seeing a ton of results like that in searches for the past few months. I know everyone is saying they are getting Reddit, Quora, Forbes, etc in their top search results, but I'm not getting Reddit, Quora, or Forbes in any of my search results at all. I must be searching for things that don’t get covered on Reddit, Quora, or Forbes much. But, I am seeing, just a shit ton load of garbled up clearly respun articles, that are so badly jumbled that it’s not even possible to make heads or tails of what the article is trying to say. I been seeing results like that ever since the August update and it got worse after the September update.

So, to me, it looks like Google cares LESS about content than ever.

>>>Low-value content created through automated means can expect major declines.

I think this could go either way. Poor quality content has always been an issue. Has been for close to three decades now. There are always waves and dips in it. I think it will always be there because there are always going to be the get-rich-quick-schemers pumping out shit fast. But at the same time there will always be the passionate people putting out high quality.

But also automation does not mean low quality. Sure automation is often lower quality, but it can be higher quality as well. It’s all in how you use it.

>>>After going through those sites, most just don’t have great content… I’m seeing AI-generated content,

I agree that we are seeing a high rate of low quality right now, due largely to the hype over AI, but as the honeymoon with AI wears off, many will just plain get bored with playing with AI and move on to something else. That is just the nature of trends and why trend come and go so often. People are fickle and get bored easily. People jump on and off bandwagons all the time. Some will stick with AI and use it for years to come, but many will find a new shiny object to honeymoon over and toss AI aside. Right now AI is the shiny new toy so everyone want to try it out.

Also, I don’t think all AI content is bad or low quality. With proper human editing/fact checking/tweaking, it can be quite good.

>>>programmatic content used to churn out many unhelpful pages, sites that cover every imaginable variation of a topic without providing truly insightful or valuable information, and more.

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of this too. I’m an author (Romance novels, set in historical time periods) and so I have to do a lot of research into various aspects of cultures and history, for each novel I write, and before AI, I could find these great sites that would have tons of in depth detailed info about super specific things (like hundreds of pages about the history of just one town), and now since AI, I’m finding it very difficult to sift through the listicle AI written fluff that is flooding top search results, to find the actual, factual accurate, fully detailed sites.

I mean, if I need to know the mineral compound of the sand at this exact GPS location, because I’m adding a mystery element to the story and that type of sand ONLY being found in that one town is the evidence the detective needs, well, a ChatGPT written top 10 list of the king’s favorite fruits (including fruits that had not yet been discovered in his time period, because the site owner did not fact check the list ChatGPT gave them) is not going to help my research, but Google thinks it will help my research so that’s what Google gave me - what the fuck?.

I need historical accuracy. My novels are known for sticking to those little minute historically accurate details. And this mass onslaught of ChatGPT list-soup full of flagrant inaccuracies has made doing online research a total nightmare the past few months. And Google is just putting all these inaccurate list sites at the top of search results since HCU, soooo, I’m not impressed with HCU, from the perspective of a person trying to search for accurate information and Google is just giving me thousands of pages of blatantly inaccurate ChatGPT outputs. Very frustrating trying to do research since AI, that’s for sure, and more so since the HCU update.

HCU has NOT been helpful at knowing THIS user’s search intent, I can tell you that. I am very frustrated, as someone who searches for historical data on a daily basis. I am very frustrated by the LACK of helpful sites in search results since the HCU happened.

>>>User experience matters too - disruptive ads, popups, distractions remove focus from content. Tread carefully with monetization methods and keep user experience front of mind.

This I agree with.

I don’t post here very often, cause I’m not an SEO expert. I don’t work in SEO, so I rarely have any advice to offer. I’m just a business person who needed a website and built it myself, and came here to read the advice others give and try to apply their advice to my site.

After the HCU though I started lurking here daily, because I was seeing so many people getting hit so bad and if they link their site, I go have a look and see if I can see anything that is notably wrong. And I’ve looked at maybe 400 to 500 sites posted here in the past 3 or 4 months, and I am noticing that a good 80% to 90% of them are a massive amount of ad spam, affiliate link spam, and a LOT of them have a serious popup problem, where the popups load and load and load, I click out of 4 or 5 popups one after another and 10 or 12 more popups load, I click out of those and, somewhere around the 40th to 50th popup I give up on trying to figure what in the heck their site even was because I don’t feel like playing whack a mole with the hundreds of endless popups that won’t stop loading.

If it was one or two sites that had the massive avalanche of endless popups, I would think it was just they pasted the code into their header wrong. But, it’s happened to well over a hundred different sites, posted on this sub, and I’ve seen it so many times now, that I think it must be some sort of deliberate endless popup code, that causes 2 additional popups to open, for everyone popup you close, in hopes of getting lots of ad clicks to make money off people randomly clicking lots and lots of ads in the space of a few seconds. Makes me wonder what their motive for posting their site was, actually. Did they REALLY get hit by HCU or are just just hoping for extra ad clicks for saying they got hit by HCU?

Many others are just a landing page with hundreds and hundreds of affiliate links and no articles or blog posts.

It’s REALLY noticeable that Google HCU is swinging the hammer down hard on sites with affiliate links and sites with pop-up ads. It is the one thing I am seeing that the bulk of the sites saying they are hit by HCU, have in common.

But then, it’s not every site. I am also seeing a lot of well written sites, the owner clearly passionate about their topic, and few to zero ads, few to zero affiliate links, nothing appears wrong about their sites at all and yet, they too were hit hard by HCU. And so, while pop-up ads and affiliate links are clearly a big target for HCU, ads can not be blamed as the problem in every case.

I wanted to test this out. See, my site is NOT monetized *(I live in a region where the government has a ban on affiliate programs, so trying to join an affiliate program, just gives me an error message saying “we’re sorry, our program is not available in your region”, so I have ZERO affiliate links on my site)* and I was not hit by HCU. And I wanted to find out, was my site not hit by HCU BECAUSE I have ZERO ads and ZERO affiliate links on my site? Could that possibly be the reason? The only way to find out was to add ads to my site and see what happened.

So, there was no way for me to add any affiliate links to test that out, due to the region I live in, but I was able to apply for, get approved, for Google AdSense, and so a few weeks ago, after 28 years of never once having a single ad on my site, I added AdSense to my site, and within 3 days my traffic dropped by 70% AND - I have ZERO videos on my site, but within 4 hours of adding AdSense, I started getting an error message in GSC starting my video players were too small, as well as an error stating that my site had load stability, and my page load speed dropped from 20 second average to 300 second average! And the ONLY change I made was to add AdSense to my site!

Taking AdSense off my site a week later, my traffic immediately returned, the page load speeds went back to normal, and the errors about video players and page shifts went away.

Clearly adding AdSense to my site, caused the “death by HCU effect” that so many people are seeing, and so, it actually looks like Google is bitch slapping any site that has ads on it, even if they are Google’s own AdSense ads!

I don’t have any sort of answer or solution for what to do about it, but, to me, it looks like Google is making webmasters make a choice of: ads or traffic. You can have your ads or you can have your traffic, but not both. Remove ads and BOOM traffic returns; add ads and BOOM your traffic is gone. I mean, I was able to FORCE the HCU effect on my site by adding ads to my site for a week, and I was able to remove the HCU effect by removing those ads a week later, so clearly having ads on your site is what is DIRECTLY CAUSING deep cuts into traffic, but I have no idea why.

The advice is therefore, if you want traffic, you have to remove 100% of ads, but that's not an option for a lot of people. Me, I have a product, so visitors can by my product, and so I do not require ads or affiliate links, but for a lot of people making their own product is not an option and ads or affiliate links ARE their income, so they can’t remove all of them because it just plain defeats the purpose of them having a website at all.

Okay, so I get that some site are spamming ads and links and Google wants to crack down on hose, but whatever HCU does it is not going after JUST the spammy sites, because it’s just going after EVERY site with ads or affiliates, even the sites that are not spammy about it.

Google has basically said they have to sacrifice their traffic or their ads, and no matter what the webmaster chooses, they are going to lose their income! They need the ads to feed their families. But they need traffic for the ads to pay them money. The ads won’t bring in money without traffic, but in order to get traffic, they have to ditch the ads. Ditch the ads gives them traffic back, but what good is traffic without ads? It really does look like Google is saying if you don’t have your own product, then Google does not want to rank you.

>>>Quick fixes unlikely to help recovery, long term investments in content and UX improvements matter most.

I agree with this too. I don’t know what people can do to fix their sites, because like I said, I’m not in SEO so I have no clue what to do in matters like this. But, now that it’s been a few months, I’m seeing a lot of people making big changes, making what appears to be good improvements and still not seeing a return in their traffic. I feel so bad for them, because I wish I knew how to help them, but I don’t.

>>>>Good to see another real business on here. My suggestion is talk to business owners, not bloggers.

Agreed.

I don't understand the mindset of blogging as a business in and of itself. To my mind a blog should be part of your marketing strategy for your offline brick and mortar business, to help bring wider online awareness to your offline presence.

I have a blog, but it is a blog FOR my business. The business itself is not the blog. In fact my business was founded in 1978 long before the internet existed, let alone blogging. The blog helps bring online awareness of my offline presence.

My business sells a product offline, which in recent years is now available online as well, but the bulk of my sales is still from local face to face offline sales to tourists in the summer. So, I am making money from sales of my products, not traffic to my blog. Thus my blog is unmonetized, though my blog directs people to where they can find my products for sale.

The biggest part of my marketing is attending conventions (cosplay conventions) in the summer and meeting my fans and readers (I'm a Yaoi author) face to face in person. This is where a huge amount of my sales comes from, with most of my yearly income coming in in just a small 3 month window of time. And it's offline sales of physical products (canvas paintings, cloth dolls, costumes, jewellery, and paperback novels) from a booth.

Readers look to my blog to find out where I am going to be, what products I will have at the event, etc.

I think people around here have a deeply flawed and limited view on what content is.

They hear CONTENT and thing blog posts, but forget that handmade dolls are content for a sales booth too.

Content is ANY item you create.

Walk into WalMart and look at all the CONTENT on the shelves: fruit, vegetables, hardware, autoparts - EVERYTHING a consumer buys is CONTENT.

Content is King because without content, you will literally starve to death.

You need content on store shelves for you to buy food. The FOOD IS THE CONTENT!

But people around here hear CONTENT and thing blog posts.

Yes, blog posts are ONE TYPE of content, but not ALL content is blog posts.

While I understand that some bloggers do make a full time business out of their blogs, I also realize that this is incredibly rare and takes a lot more business savvy then just slapping a few affiliate links on dime a dozen respun articles.

I have a degree a Business Management and I like to talk about educated business related topics with other like minded educated business professionals and that is what I expect to find when I search for SEO experts to talk to, because I don't know SEO and I would like to learn SEO to help my website and blog bring better sales conventions to my offline business.

But then I end up frustrated because all I ever seem to find are people who have so little education that they can not even strung together basic simple sentences in any form of clarity at all. To me that is disheartening because if they don't have enough education to string together a kindergarten level sentence, how can trust them to be an actual business professional with an actual degree in Marketing, and isn’t that what SEO is? SEO is a subset of Marketing and I would expect a professional SEO to at MINIMUM have a Masters Degree in Business Marketing if not ALSO a Masters in Business Management as well.

And yet, I find it difficult to find any so called SEO experts who can communicate on a middle grade level, let alone a high school or college level, they never use professional dialogue and often use less then professional etiquette or behavior, often acting more like children then adults and for as little SEO as I know, it's often clear I have a far better understanding of SEO the the self proclaimed expects do, which is very unsettling considering I know next to nothing about SEO.

>>>>Good to see another real business on here. My suggestion is talk to business owners, not bloggers.

I'm just glad to see that I am not the only business professional who is seeking out actual business professionals.

I wish there were more business focused SEO “experts” around here offering advice related to using Seo to improve conversions from sites to an offline business. That would be so much more useful to me.

>>>Am I doing things right?

I am not an SEO person, so my advice could be wrong, I like you, am a business person who needed a website for my career, and so what I know, I know from just flailing around aimlessly and figuring out what worked and wanted didn't work, so I don’t know if what I do is good SEO habits or not, nor do I know if it'll work for other niches.

Also I'm not in real estate, I'm a person who makes crafty things and sells them from a booth at festivals, state fairs, carnivals, and conventions in the summer, and uses my blog in the off season to showcase stuff I am making for next year's circuit season. I sell canvas paintings, cloth dolls, costumes, jewelry, and locally small press printed chapbook novellas, from a tent booth set up at various summer events, and so I'm dealing with a niche quite a bit different from real estate.

My blog focuses on mostly Elves and Unicorns, because that's what I make and sell. Elf and Unicorn dolls, costumes, chapbooks. So, yeah, while this works for me and my niche, I have no clue if it'll translate over into something like real estate.

>>>I have only started backlinking around 2 weeks ago.

My business started in 1978 and my website started in 1996. And I first heard about backlinks a little over 2 months ago when I joined this sub. Sooooo, I have no clue anything about anything involved in backlinks at all.

Never bought any, never requested any, didn't even know they was a thing. When I saw people here talking about them, I looked to see how to find out if I had any and I have just over 300 of them, but no clue what to do with that information now that I know it's there.

>>>I am planning on improving the website speed

That doesn't seem to be an issue for my site.

Gsc tells my most of my pages are 300seconds+ and that I should try to get them down to under 10seconds each, buuuuut, most of my pages have between 100 to 400 very large images/photos on them, there are more than 14k photos on my site total, so, yeah, I don't think improving page speeds is going to happen. But also, the low page speeds do not seem to be impacting page rankings either.

I suppose if you only have a few images on your size, improving page speed should be something to do.

>but apart from that and adding more content and backlinks what should I do?

More content has just been my method, though it's not consistent, how much, how often, or what kind of content I add.

I may get in a binge blogging mood and write 3 blog posts a day for a week, then not write a single blog post for the rest of the year, and this has not been an issue with my rankings.

But I think this is because my content is fairly “evergreen”. Like if I am sewing a soft sculpted unicorn, I'll make a blog post showing how I did it, so others can make it as well. Well there's nothing particularly dated about that. It isn’t influenced by seasonal holidays and it's not like a software program that will be obsolete in a few months. Unicorns are a pretty generic thing that often show up in kids birthday parties, so a parent may randomly be searching for how to make a stuffed unicorn for a party decoration at any time of the year during any year, so the blog post is relevant ten years ago and ten years from now as well.

So, my content doesn't rely on things like “up to date freshness” and stays relevant for decades, so I don’t have to stick to a rigid daily upload schedule in order to keep my blog posts relevant.

Thus I would say creating evergreen articles for your niche is important, but I'm not sure every niche is evergreen enough to do that, so it might not work for everyone.

I know everyone on this sub preaches keywords and keyword research, but funny thing is I have been building my website for 28 years now, just fine without even knowing about the existence of either keywords or keyword research.

I write about topic relevant to my business so, I guess I sort of was sticking with the whole keyword advice aspect without even realizing it, lol!

Producing relevant content, relevant to your business is my advice as this what has always worked for me.

>>>The most important thing is having the listings pages appear on searches.

Yes, this I can understand. You are dealing with a volatile industry, where selling OOAK items is the focus (houses in your case), so making sure current listing in top search results because more important than anything else.

I don't have any advice here. I'm afraid this is exactly the sort of SEO advice I was looking for as well.

So, my thoughts are this: if you want an audience, you need to have common ground with that audience.

For example, if you read comic books, and talk on Twitter about your favourite superheros, the people who start following you will be fans of that same superhero. They follow you because you share a common Fandom. They follow you because you like the same thing they do, in this example a specific superhero.

That is how you build an audience.

You have a thing which you like or do or collect or feel strongly about, and you talk about that thing. Soon, other people who like that same thing start following you because they identify with you and want to follow you so they can talk to you about your shared interests.

No one will follow someone they do not identify with.

No one will follow someone they can not relate to.

No one will follow someone they do not feel a personal connection to.

And this is why it is pointless to build your audience before you have a niche.

Say you build an audience from sharing cute pet rat photos and then start a store which is focused on rodent extermination pest control and selling rat traps. You will lose 90% of your following in a matter of minutes as you pet rat enthusiast followers mass unfollow you. Why? Because you built an audience around keeping rats for pets only to start marketing ways to kill rats to them.

You have to know what your niche is going to be BEFORE you can start building an audience, because you want your audience to be fans of that niche, so that when the time comes that you do start monetization you have targeted followers who are actually going to want your product.

So, my advice is build up your niche first, then start looking for followers who are fans of that niche.

Ask yourself this:

What good are 50k followers, if they have ZERO interest in your niche?

Having one mega fan follower who buys all of your products, makes you far more money then having 50k fake followers who buy nothing.

If you do not have content for people to interact with, how do you expect to find even one person to follow you?

So, I know absolutely nothing about the 3 niches you are considering and can not give any advice pertaining to which of them you should choose.

I can give you advice on HOW you should decide which one to choose.

Ask yourself this: which one are you so incredibly passionate about that you can see yourself writing a new blog post about it everyday for the rest of your life (without using AI)?

Whichever one you are so deeply, maddeningly in love with that you can write endless thousands of blog posts about it for the next 50+ years, THAT is the one you should pick.

When I got started, I only considered what is it I knew I would want to write about for the rest of my life. The answer? Elves, Faeries, Unicorns, Wizards, how to create them, and how to build the world's they live in. Thus why my blog is entirely about how to create Elves, Faeries, Unicorns, and Wizards, how to build worlds for them to live in, and how to write lore for them.

Yes, you read that correctly. My niche is unicorns and Elf wizards.

Started the blog in 1996, post 1 to 3 articles daily, crossed 10k articles published in 2017, and in 2026 it will celebrate its 30th anniversary.

Is it lucrative? Eh. Depends on your definition of lucrative i suppose. It brings in around $6k a week.

HOWEVER my site is NOT monetized because I live in a region where the government has a ban on affiliate programs, so trying to join an affiliate program, just gives me an error message saying “we’re sorry, our program is not available in your region”, so I have ZERO affiliate links on my site.

So for me affiliate marketing was/is not an option, so I had to make my own product that people directly buy from me.

This means, what I do to create an income is going to be vastly different then what you will be doing because for me, I had to think creatively as to HOW can my blog make money when I live in a region where affiliate programs are banned by my local government.

End result products are handmade one of a kind by me, (and sold on Etsy, Amazon, DriveThruRPG, Zazzle, SpoonFlower, Lulu, and GumRoad) not affiliate links to products made by others nor mass produced dropshiped crap. My blog articles show step by step, how I make my art, my dolls, my figurines, my costumes, and my books, with photos of the items as I sew them. It's one of a kind, original, unique, not dime a dozen rehashed crap found on millions of other sites.

I don't have ads.

I don't have affiliate marketing links.

Be original.

Have something no one else has.

Avoid drop shipping.

Avoid affiliates.

Avoid ads.

Sell handmade one of a kind crafts and teach people how you make them.

That is what works for me. So, I can not offer any tips on affiliates because I have not done that side of things.

Google updates don't hit me because, I'm not doing the same thing found on millions of other sites. I rank #1 for most of my target keywords. None of my keywords are ranking under #17. All because I DO NOT copy what others are doing.

Also, my primary keywords are what SEOs call “branded keywords” meaning people are searching for me by name, searching for my books by title, searching for my art/dolls/costumes by character names. So it is NOT general, dime a dozen generic keywords I am ranking for, but rather very specific to me and me alone brand name keywords, which also explains why I rank #1 for so many keywords.

Users looking for unique original OOAK Elf, Unicorn, and Wizard content that can be found nowhere else love my site, precisely BECAUSE it's not a dime a dozen respin of everything everyone else is doing.

Be unique = soar to the top with zero competition.

Do what everyone else is doing = sink to the bottom with them and wallow in the oversaturation sludge at the bottom.

I was right to pick Elves, Faeries, Unicorns, and Wizards as my blog topic because now three decades later, I am still rabidly obsessed with them, still love writing about them daily, and still daily addicted to adding to my blog about them.

And as the blog and the products I sell from it is my full time job, I have a job that I love doing.

My advice is pick something you are obsessed with, something you have been obsessed with for decades already, something you know you'll still be obsessed with for decades to come, and whatever that thing is, that is what your blog topic should be.

What niche is best to invest in? Whichever one you will most enjoy writing articles about every day for the rest of your life.

How big of a name brand can YOUR REAL NAME become in your niche? That's the thing I find that drives traffic best. People searching for YOU BY NAME is going to get far more traffic than people searching for generic topic keywords.

For example, people searching for my name, brings in more traffic than people searching for elves.

If you want people to look to you as an expert on your niche, you first must become the expert they expect you to be.

Thanks to being a big name celebrity author who can prove my expert authority in my niche of Elves, Unicorns, and wizards by simply directing you to my 138 novels, 423 novellas, and 2,000+ short stories published since 1978, featuring Elf characters and Unicorn character.

I get upto 7million visitors per month on my blog BECAUSE people know they can trust me to be the world's top authority in the topic of Elf Wizards and Unicorns, thanks to having sold over ten million copies of novels featuring Elf and Unicorn characters.

How big of a big name are you in YOUR niche, because however big your authority level in your field is, that's how big your traffic is going to be.

ANY TOPIC can become a lucrative income, if you have enough passion and drive and creative thinking and self discipline and determination to still with that topic and find way to make that topic become lucrative.

Remember just because a topic is not lucrative to OTHERS does not mean you can not make it lucrative for YOU.

Look at me. I made my topic lucrative FOR ME. But it is a topic so niche that no one in their right mind would ever attempt it because for 99.99% of people out there, my niche will not be lucrative FOR THEM.

That is why it is important to do something worth writing about BEFORE you start your website.

If you want to succeed in building websites, that get a shit ton load of traffic, you NEED to be an ACTUAL expert who has ACTUAL authority in your niche.

So, ask yourself: what are YOU an expert in? What is YOUR personal field of professional authority.

However you answer that question, that is the niche you should focus on, because that niche, no matter what it is, is what you have enough experience in to speak about it with a voice of TRUE and ACTUAL authority.

What am I an expert in?

I am an expert in building Elf society, and giving those Elves Faeries, Unicorns, and Demon lovers, and making all of them be Wizards, and teaching young writers how to create them, and how to build the world's they live in.

I am quite literally the world's number one top authority on Elves and Elf wizards.

And BECAUSE I am quite literally the world's number one top authority on Elves and Elf wizards, that therefore is the niche I focus SEO on.

You can succeed in ANY niche, you just have to be the world's reigning top authority in that niche FIRST.

And I am up against some mega sized competition too.

My biggest competition is Brandon Sanderson's worldbuilding website. Followed by everything related to Harry Potter. Good thing I am myself a household name bestselling author of traditionally published Fantasy novels, one of which sold 30million copies, another of which sold 10million copies. I wouldn't be able to rank number 1 position for the 17k keywords I rank number one on if I was a no name nobody trying to build an affiliate marketing website in my niche.

And THAT RIGHT THERE is why most affiliates will fail. No one is searching for the blogger BY NAME. And there is no reason to search for someone who blogs ABOUT pet insurance, when you can go directly to the insurance company website directly instead. You have to become known as the top go to advisor on buying pet insurance, and get people searching for YOUR NAME instead of searching for pet insurance.

Be true to who you are and write what you love. It really is the one thing that will set you leaps and bounds ahead of all the dime a dozen affiliate marketing sites that can't reach it to the top.

Too many sites try to follow the leader and do what everyone else is doing, and they all sink to the bottom together, because NONE of them is unique, NONE of them stands out as original. They are all just regurgitating each other in their trip to see who can make it to the bottom fastest.

If you are not different, if you are not unique, you will not succeed.

You win by standing out from the crowd not by blending in with it.

That's what worked for me personally, at least. And I truly believe it's the best way to succeed in the world of SEO, blogging, and content creation.

*DISCLAIMER: I am not an SEO person. I am just a business owner who built my own website, so this is just my personal experience with my own site and I am uncertain of the SEO implications of this experience.*

My first time learning that anchor text can impact your site, was when a very disturbing thing happened to my site in 2020.

My site suddenly, which normally ranks for terms such as “worldbuilding elf society” or “how to self publish fantasy novels” suddenly started ranking for "ciri child rape cosplay porn" and I couldn't figure out why or how. These were not words or topics that appeared on my site. It was extremely baffling.

BUT, something far worse happened at the same time.

In 2019 my site was getting 10k+ visits a day and millions of impressions a week.

But days after it started ranking for "ciri child rape cosplay porn" traffic dropped off completely. Ten or fewer visits a day, and a hundred or fewer impressions a day.

It took several weeks for me to figure out what happened.

What happened was, the day after my site started ranking for "ciri child rape cosplay porn", Google put my site behind SafeSearch and claimed it a "sex video website". I found out because Google sent me an email telling me they had done it.

Uhm, what?

My site is about teaching teens how to write unicorns and elves, how to worldbuild unicorn and elf societies, and how to write and self publish stories about unicorns and elves, there are no videos or anything even remotely adult on my site.

How in the heck was Google claiming that my site was an adult porn video site?

What in the heck on my site would need to be behind SafeSearch?

Heck, my top traffic comes from middle grade school teachers teaching children how to write! It's a worldbuilding site for novel writers that focuses on unicorns and elves.

I went through the Google appeals system (which is located in the Google AdSense dashboard, even though I did not have AdSense on my site) for SafeSearch, and it kept getting denied by auto bots, and I could not get a human to review my site, so I finally, after a full year of getting no where via the appeals automated system, I went to JohnMu's Twitter and messaged him, told him what was going on... and he looked into and got back to me a few days later with what he found.

What he found out was this:

Turns out I had over 200k spam backlinks from Russia and Korea, and THOSE 200k sites linking to me, were adult porn video sites, and ALL of their 200k backlinks to my site were using the anchor text "ciri child rape cosplay porn".

Because they were using the anchor text "ciri child rape cosplay porn" on THIER sites, Google concluded that "ciri child rape cosplay porn” was the primary keyword topic of MY site!

AND because THEIR sites were adult porn video sites, and they were linking to my site, Google concluded that MY site must also be an adult porn video site!

JohnMu explained that this was due to some Google SafeSearch update that happened in January 2020, which had started ranking your site based on anchor texts used by other sites when linking to you. He said it had caused a false positive where a lot of not adult sites got put behind SafeSearch due to adult sites linking to them.

And so, even though no where on my site did the words "ciri child rape cosplay porn" I was ranking #1 for that keyword because there were 200k anchor texts for that phrase, linking to my site.

And even though I have ZERO videos on my site, Google thought my site was a porn video site because 200k porn video sites were linking to me.

He sent my site to the manual review team to get the SafeSearch removed (and it took them 4 months to finally remove it… they removed it in May 2023, and it had been on my site since January 2020, so it took me a full three years of back and forth with Google before Google FINALLY removed SafeSearch off my site).

In May 2023 JohnMu said to me that Google had fixed the false positive issue with SafeSearch incorrectly being put on sites due to porn sites linking to them, and he said to not worry about the spam links because Google just ignores them now since the May 2023 update.

But I don't know if I trust that.

Google clearly DOES NOT IGNORE them, because Google would NOT have placed MY site behind SafeSearch because of them if Google did ignore them, right?

Right?

In anycase, about 6 months later, (October 2023, 6 month after Google removed SafeSearch, 3 years after SafeSearch was incorrectly put on my site) my site suddenly stopped ranking for that phrase and a lot of those backlinks vanished on their own.

It was very eye opening for me because it taught me how much HUGE weight Google put on the anchor text of OTHER websites, to decide what keywords MY site is about.

I have never bought backlinks, I didn't even know buying backlinks was a thing, until I this happened. So, for a while I had no clue how my site hot the 200k porn backlinks.

I did eventually find out where they came from. It turns out, a minister from a local church, assigned one of his priests to buy them. I found out, because he was bragging on his church's Facebook page that he had done it. Turns out, he was my mother's minister, and he has a “mission” to take out “gay websites” and had asked his congregation to submit to him any websites they knew of that was pro LGBTQAI+ so that his bishopric priests could take the list and buy porn links in a deliberate negative SEO attack. And because I am an author who has published novels featuring gay couple main characters, my mother gave my website to her bishop. The bishop himself (I asked him and he proudly admitted it) came up with the keyword phrase anchor text "ciri child rape cosplay porn” and paid the backlink company to specificly use that phrase as the anchor text. Thus how the 200k porn links using that anchor text ended up linking to my site.

So, this was my first experience with learning what anchor texts were and how off site SEO uses them to rank your site for keywords that are not on your site.

This in turn, changed my method of internal linking between my own pages.

Previously my anchor texts were all things like “For more info click here”. Now, I make sure to put the links in the body of the text on the page, and the link is always an entire full sentence now, ensuring that the sentence includes the keyword the primary keyword of the page being linked to. For example a sentence saying : “I run my manuscript through at least seven edits before submitting it to a publisher” would become a link to a page with the keyword “how to edit novel manuscripts”. It's not exactly the same keyword, but it is the same topic.

Anyways, I am new to learning SEO, so I don’t know how good or bad doing this is. I'm sure there are others on this sub who can give you better information on using anchor texts. But hopefully this helps you out.

I do. Often.

My site has been online since 1996. On its's current domain since 2013.

The most trafficked keyword it ranks for has remained #1 place on Google since 2005 and still retains #1 place now in 2024, NEVER ONCE moving from #1 spot for that one keyword, in a solid 19 years.

It is followed by more than 500 other keywords, again the most trafficked keywords of the site, and each of those has ranked #1 place without fluctuation of 10+ years.

Why?

They are branded keywords.

Meaning: my real name, the names of my books, the names of my characters, the names of my cars, the names of movies I've been in... I even outrank Stephen King for over a thousand keywords related to Thinner and Christine, the 2 most famous movies I've been in.

I am the author of 138 traditionally published novels, 423 self-published novellas, and more than two thousand short stories published in more than 200 print magazines since 1978. One book sold 30Million copies, another sod over a million. In total I've sold more than fifty seven million books in the past 48 years.

I am the world's 3rd highest selling author in my genre.

I am famous enough to be an international household name with in my genre.

And because of this, people go to Google and direct type my name itself, the names of my books, names of my characters, and my site ranks number one for all of those without a flicker, because I am the person they searched for.

If you are a brand, Google directs traffic to the brand.

For example, if you search for Coke A Cola, Google sends you to the Coke official website NOT to some affiliate trying to make money off 10 ten lists of things you can do with coke.

If you are an original, unique brand, you'll sit at the top and you won't move at all, and no amount of SEO on the part of affiliate sites can knock you down.

That's what is known as REAL and ACTUAL authority in your niche.

What you are describing, sounds like you have a very niche focused brand name keyword that you are ranking for. Those rarely move.

*(DISCLAIMER: I'm not an SEO person, just an offline combination "retail/art/live entertainment at circuit events/multifaceted local celebrity" type of branded business that built its own site, so this is based personal experience with the one site only, where the nich is the entertainer themselves, and falls in the tourism and live arts niche along with several related niches and relies heavily of "branded local" keyword searches, and may not reflect typical/standard/generic/non-branded/non-celebrity personal venue sites, SEO practices, and results could be different for other sites/niches/regions/etc)*

>>How would this work with SEOs operating in different niches?

>not sure exactly, but maybe this is an annual competition and we change niches every year?

Uhm… so you do not know what the word niche means or how one builds a niche website. Got it.

Consider this: I have what is literally the world's oldest (1996), largest (18k articles all written by me since 1996), and most trafficked (average of 7 million visitors a month) website on the topic of Elves and Unicorns. And other so-called SEO gurus have given me challenges like yours.

In 2017 Tom Addams an up and rising self proclaimed SEO expert gave me a challenge: make these two keywords rank: “flamboyant nipples” and “wizard testicles”. He then proceeded to make a website called “Flamboyant Nipples, Wizard Testicles” and said, he guaranteed that in 6 months he would rank #1 on Google. He spent a lot of money trying to rank his site. He wanted to prove he was the world's greatest SEO guru and he used Reddit and the Warriors Forum to boast this and post this challenge.

Me? I wrote a novel for my established series that already had 138 novels, 423 novellas, and 2k short stories published since 1978. I gave my Elf wizard main character magic jewelry, nipple rings and scrotum rings that shoot fireballs. I made a Twitch livestream of me writing it, taking suggestions from viewers as I wrote it. In under 7 days I wrote, edited, and published the novel “Flamboyant Nipples, Wizard Testicles”, made a Twitch stream which archived as a YouTube video, documented the process on my website, and then… I repainted the 21 foot tall 1950s billboard that sits in my driveway, on a beach that gets 2million tourists a week to advertise the book, which I sold out of the trunk of my car to tourists walking past my driveway on the way to the beach.

In under 2 weeks I ranked #1 on Google for more than a thousand keywords related to Elf nipples, Elf testicles, Unicorn nipples, Unicorn testicles, wizard nipples, wizard testicles, including the challenge keywords flamboyant nipples and wizard testicles. 6 years later, I STILL rank #1 for those keywords, SEO hive minds no longer worship Tom Addams, who has been largely forgotten in most SEO circles, and I sold over a million copies of yet another novel.

The Elf with wizard testicles hidden behind his resplendent gold lame skivvies.

I am the world's number one top authority on Elves, Unicorns, and Elf Wizards and I write Yaoi, a sub genre of Erotica. It took me under a week to rank the keywords in the challenge, simple by adding Elves and Unicorns to them, leveraging my niche, my brand, and calling upon my rabid, lustful, die hard fans who can't get enough naked Elves and thought a novel about Elf nipples and Elf testicles were great.

Tom Addams on the other hand was an egotistical SEO guru who quickly proved he knew nothing about SEO, marketing, fan bases, or how niche markets function. By the end of his 6 months challenge, he was the laughing stock of the SEO community and I was the #3 highest selling Yaoi author ON THE PLANET.

Yaoi if you're don't know is Gay Erotica, designed for straight female readers.

Other SEO gurus have risen up since Tom Addams and tried to challenge me with other keywords.

I know absolutely nothing about SEO. But I do know my niche. My niche is Elves and Unicorns.

EVERY keyword you give me, ANY keyword you give me, I can slap it on to an Elf or a Unicorn, write a Yaoi novel using that keyword as the book title, repaint the billboard in my driveway, and BOOM I will outrank EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE ON THE PLANET REGARDLESS OF THEIR NICHE for that keyword, because I know MY NICHE so well that I can rank any keyword in it.

That is how niches work.

That is how niches function.

I see so many on this sub, flinging around the word niche like it is some magic wand, but not a one of them demonstrates that they know even one iota about what a niche ACTUALLY is, how niches ACTUALLY work, and I've yet to see any one on this sub even mention the power of fanbases.

A niche means nothing without a fantasy.

SEO has no power without a fantasy.

If you have no fantasy vying to buy products from your niche, then you will have ZERO traffic in your niche no matter how good your site is optimized for search engines.

Why do so many on this sub, neglect to consider the HUMAN aspect of search engines?

It is people, living, breathing PEOPLE who type keywords into search boxes.

Yes, it's a bot that shows the results, but it's PEOPLE who type in search. PEOPLE who are looking for something. PEOPLE who are FANS of a NICHE.

Satisfy the needs of the fanbase and you win. THAT is the single most important aspect of SEO and yet, no one on this sub ever talks about it. No one.

You are only optimized for the search engine IF you are optimized for the PEOPLE who use that search engine.

If you are not leveraging the lists and desires of the fanbase, then no amount of optimizing for search engines is ever going to help you.

Give the PEOPLE what they want. Give the PEOPLE what they search for.

I know nothing of SEO, but I know Elves and I know Unicorns and I know what the fans of Elves and Unicorns, the PEOPLE, want to read, and what the people want trumps crawler bots every time.

I know the needs of the PEOPLE in my niche.

You can optimize for Google bots til the cows come home and you won't rank for shit. But the minute you optimize for what the fan base, the humans who use Google, wants, you'll rank so high, so fast that no one can touch you.

And the saddest part of this sub is that very few of the so called experts around here seem to have any clue how to leverage a niche, how to leverage a fan base, to rank in search engines. They fling the word niche around left and right and haven't got a clue what the word niche even means. You will never succeed in any niche, so long as you carelessly fling the word niche around like some meaningless buzzword.

Moon Elf Necromancer Quaraun and his Lich Lord Lover BoomFuzzy the Unicorn... prancing around half naked for no reason other then to excite the women who are their fans... oh look! Quaraun's wearing his Flamboyant Nipple rings that let him shoot fireballs from his nipples.

I'm sorry but, it's a wizard (Quaraun) who can shoot fireballs from his nipples when he wears magic nipple rings, and another wizard (BoomFuzzy) who can shoot fireballs from his penis, when he wears magic penis rings.

Tom Addams did not stand a chance when it came to trying to rank either “flamboyant nipples” or “wizard testicles”.

I even linked to his website to try to help him rank and it wasn't enough for him to rank.

The thing is, I been writing this sexless quasi-Erotica for just under fifty years now, I was writing seductive satire titular sadistic Elf wizards with magic dicks for decades before Tom Addams was even born. I was writing about wizard testicles with magic superpowers in the 1970s.

I got topic niche authority on my side.

The power of niche, comes from ACTUALLY KNOWING the niche fanbase.

And that's where Tom Addams failed.

For 6 months Tom Addams posted 2 or 3 times a week, weird, slipstream style short stories, that were not seductive, not titillating, not arousing, not erotic, not sensual, not romantic. They were crude, vulgar, tossed around the words penis, testicles, and nipples with as much finesse as you'd expect from a drunk orc. His stories came off as disturbing, disgusting, unappetizing, unappealing, and down right vomit worthy.

On the other hand, my Quaraun stories featured characters seducing each other and exciting the readers, while no intercourse happened on page, the heat level of the forplay was very high and there was a lot of on page nudity and fondling. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's writing hot men sucking each other's clocks.

Hmmm…autocorrect. You know what, I saw auticorrect change cocks to clocks just now and I'm not going to edit it out because that is damned funny.

In any case, Tom Addams deeply misjudged how very difficult it is to write sensuality and erotic scenes. And everything he wrote came off clunky, point of view changing wildly, head hopping gallor, and nothing enticing to keep the reader coming back for more.

He wasn't a writer. He was a self proclaimed SEO expert.

I know nothing of SEO. But I have five decades of erotic writing under my belt.

Pure SEO can't hold a candle to an ACTUAL EXPERT with an ACTUAL NICHE.

If you do not know what fanbase wants, then you don't know your niche.

There is a part of SEO that I don't see mentioned on this sub very often, but that more often than not is the actual reason for little or no traffic. People will blame Google or lack of backlinks or something else, but rarely do they consider this wee bit of detail that is far more likely to be the issue: supply vs demand.

Supply vs demand has a huge impact of SEO success or failure.

You've described that their site/content/SEO is good, yet they are not seeing results. Could it be a supply vs demand issue, meaning, have they properly estimated their actual real world demographics of their actual real world target audience?

Think of it this way: there are 8 billion people on the planet, but that does not mean you will get 8 billion visitors to your blog. Why? Supply vs demand.

The blog is the supply, but is there demand for that blog?

Just because 8 billion people exist, does not mean there are 8 billion people demanding to read your blog.

Consider this: MOST fandoms (movies, books, cartoons, video games, etc) have fewer than ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND fans WORLDWIDE.

A fandom is considered to have gone viral if it reaches a million fans.

Fandoms like Harry Potter are rare anomalies because they have multiple million fans, which almost never happens to any media ever.

A business is considered doing exceptionally above average if it reaches one thousand customers.

A business is considered an anomaly if it reaches one million customers.

Regardless of topic, the average blog gains fewer than one thousand visitors a month if it ranks number one for a hundred or more keywords. Many get fewer than a thousand visitors per year. This is considered normal and not something to be concerned about.

However if you listen to YouTube hype about SEO, you are falsely led to believe that ranking number one for a keyword will equal instant millions of visitors a day.

It's that same sort of misinformation that leads people to think Stephen King is a multi millionaire. He's not. The most he ever made in one year was $130k and that was three decades ago when he was still a best-selling author, something he also isn't anymore, and hasn't been for a long time. For over a decade his books have struggled to even reach ten thousand copies sold, let alone anything close to a million. Did you know a tree fell on his house in 2020 and there is still now in 2024 a tarp over the hole in his roof because he can't afford to fix it? The reality of a thing is often far from the online perception of that thing, and Stephen King is the perfect example of this.

What is the issue?

Supply vs demand.

In the 1980s, teens with lots of time on their hands, gobbled up Stephen King books. But by the 1990s those teens had jobs and families and no more free time to read. So while there were ten million readers buying King's books in the 2980s, fewer than ten thousand of those readers were still buying his books in the 1990s. While teens of the 1990s were gobbling up Harry Potter instead of Stephen King.

Stephen King, once an author who could write anything and have any publisher he wanted, is now seen as a liability, a risk. Publishers know his books will flop and flounder as a measly ten thousand sales and struggle to reach twenty thousand, so today in the 2000s fewer and fewer publishers are willing to publish Stephen King, simply because demand is no longer there.

Yes, Stephen King can continue to supply 2, 3, 4, 5 or more new manuscripts each year, but the supply is pointless without the demand to buy that supply.

This is very likely the same situation your friend is up against.

Your friend, a nameless no one, an average Joe who has never done anything newsworthy, has no reason to expect millions of people to be rushing to their blog. They have supply, but there is no one demanding that supply.

SEO is not a magic wand you can wave and instantly gain traffic.

If your blog only is in demand to a thousand people, because there are only a thousand people world wide interested in that topic, then no amount of SEO is ever going to bring more then one thousand people TOTAL to your blog.

I am in a small niche, so I have no reason to expect millions of visitors. My niche has a fandom of around thirty thousand people worldwide. This means, it would be foolish for me to expect anything even close to thirty thousand visitors a year, let alone per month. It doesn't matter how much supply I have, because the worldwide demand is limited to ONLY the thirty thousand people who are fans of my niche.

I find that most people go into blogging with a seriously warped perception of how many people are ACTUALLY interested in their niche.

It is far too common for people to start a blog, assume that millions of people are searching for their niche, and forget to do REAL and ACTUAL demographics research.

Consider this: if you are targeting American citizens, there are ONLY 300 million people in America and more than 100 million of them are below poverty level, while 20 million of them are homeless. And a full 30% of America does not yet have access to electricity, running tap water, cell phones, or internet.

Google controls 90% of AMERICAN search results, not GLOBAL search results. That means out of the 8 billion people on the planet, fewer than 200 million of them are Americans using Google.

Now consider prime time TV shows. The largest, most watched shows in America are watched by fewer than ten million people.

The numbers are smaller for movies in America, where a movie is doing well if even ONE MILLION people total go see it at a theater.

Did you know that the average best-selling traditionally published novel in America will NEVER sell more than five thousand copies, while the average best-selling self published novel in America will NEVER sell more than five hundred copies…total lifetime sales.

REAL AND ACTUAL demographics numbers are much, much, much, MUCH lower than what the scammers hype in their YouTube videos.

Blogs get less traffic on average than a novel will get in sales.

Let that soak in for a minute and you will see WHY your friend is being foolish.

In the end, no matter what their topic is, it is highly unlikely that there will be more than ten thousand people on the planet who are interested in their blog's topic, meaning no amount of SEO white hat, grey hat, black hat or otherwise, is going to increase their traffic.

People are far too quick to blame their lack of traffic on Google updates, when it is far more likely there is just not enough demand in their topic to meet the oversaturated supply.

And likewise, far too many people think SEO is a magic pill that is going to POOF traffic to them, when traffic comes from demand and SEO can not fix a lack of demand.

Before your friend totally obliterates their professional reputation, ask them to first do some heavy duty research into the real and actual demographic demand of their target audience.

Remember: you can not drive a thousand people to your blog if only ten people are actually interested in the topic.

• LibreOffice for writing content

• ProWritingAid (paid edition) for editing

• EditPad7 for writing html/code/javascript/J-son-ld/css/c++

• AceCad-DigiMemo when blizzard season hits and we are months on end without electricity up here in the deep north where we also only get 3 hours of sunlight a day for 6 months of the year

• Dip Pen, India Ink, and lined Legal Pad when AceCad batteries go dead

I keep LibreOffice on a portable drive, that way anything with a usb port can use it, thus I can type on my PC, my laptop, my tablet (it's a windows tablet not an android), the library computer, my brother's computer, my husbands computer... It's one of those 11TB hard drives by SeaGate, it stores all my writing software and manuscripts, and the .docs are Google doc compatible and ProWritingAid compatible so it's great, because I just download LibreOffice onto that one portable hard drive and can take it with me anywhere and use on anything with a usb port.

>Human Brain Version 1

My fave program. I use it daily :)

For video/photos I use:

• * Canon Vixia HF r700

To pull stills out of the film to create photos, I use:

• * VideoPad

For character art I use:

• * HeroForge

For novel/novella/& short story covers I use:

1. * Depositphotos
2. * Bigstock
3. * MorgueFile
4. * Dreamstime

I have a bunch of font sets that I bought from the artist back in the 1990s and their site no longer exists.

All of the above are edited into the final product (either images for my site or book covers for my books) with:

• * Chasys Draw IES

For book covers I take the ChasysDraw file and resize it to social media shareable sizes and shapes via:

• * Canva

For art images:

1. * Himi Jelly Gouche (over 200 colours)
2. * Winsor & Newton India Inks
3. * several white label brands of India Inks from China and Japan bought off Temu (over 400 colours)
4. * watercolors by Paul Rubens and all their pro and student grade subsidiaries (over 2k colours)
5. * dip pens (over 100 metal, and a few dozen glass)
6. * micro liner brushes, real squirrel hair (I have a dozen+ of each of over 100 sizes)
7. * various cold press and hot press papers, rag, and pre stretched canvases

>Can you explain what you mean by throttling? Or link to a source?

I was wondering this same thing, and tried looking it up. All I could find was weird flatearther type fear mongering on various conspiracy theory subs.

Basically, from what I found, they believe Google is run by shape shifting reptile aliens who "throttle" traffic to websites that "tell the truth" about government UFO cover ups like men in black. According to the thread I just read the whole idea was started by David Ike, sooooo, yeah, that alone ought to say how looney-tone, full blown loonie bins the commenters are.

Real crazy ass fucked up QAnon 4Chan shit.

I couldn't find anything even remotely logical, or legitimate about Google throttling traffic.

If you want to see how screwball nutjob people can be, just search for Google throttling traffic. Damn! I wish I had not searched for it now. It's one hell of a fucked up rabbit hole. YIE! How do people like that even exist?

The value of a link comes from the actual, real, relevant, HUMAN traffic it gives you.

A link that gives you no visitors is a dead link.

A dead link is sometimes called a toxic link by some SEOs, though toxic link has multiple meanings.

Google uses links to FIND your page, so they can index it, but beyond this a link has no value from Google.

A link on an active high traffic website, gets clicked on, and PEOPLE visit your site from clicking that link.

Google tracks how many people visit your site and pays attention to how long they stay and where they came from.

The site linking to you RECEIVES AUTHORITY from recommended sites (yours) that are relevant to their topic and get visited by their users.

YOUR SITE does NOT receive authority from the backlink.

Your site RECEIVES AUTHORITY by linking to others and recommending more sites to your visitors.

Remember people are not giving your site backlinks out of the goodness of their hearts. Backlinks to you give THEM far more authority value than it gives you. This is why sites that GIVE backlinks rank light-years higher than the sites they are linking to.

Scam artists selling you backlinks forget to tell you why they are giving you the backlinks. You really think they want to help others? They don't. They are in it for themselves. They backlink to you and THEIR site increases in rank, not the otherworldly around.

You could have a million backlinks pointing to you, but if NO HUMAN VISITOR ever clicks any those links to visit you, then those links are dead aka toxic in the eyes of Google, and while they do not hurt your site, they also provide no value to your site either because Google ignores backlinks which no HUMAN ever clicks on.

On the other hand, a single link on a high traffic and relevant to your topic site, could result in millions of REAL HUMANS clicking that one link and visiting your site. This Google tracks, paying attention to how long each person stays, and if they click to more of your pages, and if they return on their own a few days later without a link. This is what is known as “link juice”, because Google starts to see your site as an authority on the topic because people looking for the topic are staying and clicking through to your other pages.

Backlinks give MORE “link juice” to the site linking to you, then it does to you, however.

What this means is, the site linking to you gives a HUGE ranking boost,by recommending your site, whereas your site will only gain a tiny boost.

This is why IT IS BETTER to link from your site to other sites, then it is to receive links from their site.

However, Google gives out penalties for link farm sites, and so linking to someone can backfire, if you start linking to too many sites, especially if those sites are not the same topic as you.

Google counts ALL links.

This includes links on your page to another site, links on another site to your site, and the links you page connecting all the pages of your site together.

There are three types of links which every page on your site should have:

• * Most important: Internal links, links from page A to page B to page C within your site.
• * Second most important: External links. Links on your page that links people to someone else's site.
• * Least important and also optional: Backlinks. Links other people make to your site.

Others may disagree, but here is the “rule” I follow when creating links:

* Make sure there are no fewer than ten internal links per page, within the text body of the article itself. Making sure the anchor tags are entire full sentences and not single words or short phrases. Do this for EVERY page of the site. Make sure there is no more than one link per every thousand words of text. There should be no page on your site with anything fewer than ten internal links.

* Make sure EVERY page links to the highest rated site of your topic, which often will be Wikipedia. For example if I write an article about how to self publish a book, I turn the word “self publish” into a hyperlink to the Wikipedia page for self publishing, and later when I mention Amazon has a self publishing service, I link to that service (without an affiliate code), and still later, I'll mention some big name self published author, maybe Joe Konranth or Dean Wesley Smith and link to his personal blog. Now there are 3 external links to 3 very high rated authority sites related to self publishing, used as cited sources to reinforce the validity of what I said in my article. There can be more than one external link per page, but, there should never be more than ten external links per page. These should NEVER be monetized or affiliate links. Make sure no page on your site is without an external link, strive for three external links per page, never put more than ten external links on a page. This creates a network of on topic relevant sites that are both helpful to my readers, while also helping Google to figure out what my page is about, while also not be spammy.

* Make sure every page on your site has at least one backlink via your own social media. Every time you create a new page you should share it on minimum three social networks, which immediately gives that page three backlinks before Google even gets a chance to index it, meaning by the time Google finds it, it will already be receiving traffic from real humans via your social media. I personally share mine to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and a self made Reddit sub that is set to restricted, so that only I can post on it. Others recommend Instagram, LinkedIn, and others, but I've not tried those. You should pick social media sites that you plan to use daily for NONE self promotion reasons, and be posting a lot of chatter, so that your link posts are never more than once per every hundred or so talking with your followers posts. You can get good results with any social network as long as you use it and don't spam it.

These three things guarantee that every page of your site has at least one internal link pointing to it, one external link pointing to another site, and one backlink pointing back to your site from social media.

Additional links you can make yourself which will help your site:

* SameAs Schema Markup links. This should appear in your mini author bio, which appears on every page of your site. It should link to EVERY account you have anywhere, even your Reddit account. This helps Google figure out who you are and what your activities are off your site.

* Links from your profiles. For example, you are posting on Reddit, meaning you have a Reddit profile. Have you filled out your Reddit profile in the user settings? Most Reddit users don't even know they can. Reddit provides you with five slots to fill in. Put your website homepage in one, and your social media profiles in the other four. Twitter, Facebook, and the rest have similar options. Fill those all in everywhere. You end up creating a mini network of backlinks to your site.

* Make sure you add “share links” to your site. Those buttons for Facebook, Twitter, etc, that visitors can click on to share your article to their own Facebook and Twitter pages. This is the simplest way to get free backlinks.

Remember, you need to be proactive. There is a lot you can do, for free, on your own, that will get dozens of links pointing at each page on your site, without you ever once buying a backlink, using a link exchange, guest posting, or asking for someone to link to you.

As to a list of links…just type your page's keyword into Google and select the top 3 search results (providing the top 3 are relevant to your page) and BOOM you now have the 3 best sites for you to ask for backlinks for. No need for a list of links.

The keyword percentage thing is actually a ENGLISH GRAMMAR rule that is taught in 3rd grade to 8 year old children in Grammar and Composition Class for how to avoid repetition of words in novel writing, so that you do not bore your reader. It is not and never has been something that is SEO based.

The reason for avoiding too many of the same word, is that it is a medically proven fact that if the reader reads the same word 5 or more times in a single paragraph they start to feel drowsy, and will put the book down citing that they found it boring, but often are unable to pinpoint exactly WHY they found it boring. There have been thousands of research studies into this, mostly in the 1960s to 1980s, that were used as the basis for compiling the current English Grammar standard taught in the curricula of public schools.

The Grammar rule is that, with the exception of the articles a/an/and/the, you should never repeat the same word more then 5 times in a paragraph, and as a good/well written/grammatically correct paragraph will usually be longer then 100 words but shorter than 300 words, this translates to never use a single more than 5 times per every 300 words.

This will be the same class which also teaches the child how to use both a dictionary and a thesaurus. And teach them how to count their words:

• * one, two, three, four, five, whoops, you said sofa 5 fives in this paragraph, let's grab the thesaurus and see what we can put here instead, couch is another word for sofa, let's remove the 5th sofa and say couch instead, now your reader will not get bored with your repetitive writing and will retain interest in reading your story!
• * one, two, three, four, five, whoops, you said "he" 5 times in a row, the reader is going to forget the character's name, remove the 5th he and put his name "Harry" instead.
• * one, two, three, four, five, whoops you said green five times, yes, the grass is green, and the trees are green, but let's add more variety to hold the reader's interest, how about we say the grass is bright green and the tree is dark bluish-pine green, now let's talk about adjectives.

The reason it should be done in article writing, is the exact same reason you do it in novel writing: to retain reader interest, to avoid the reader becoming bored. And, on some levels this helps SEO because keeping the reader interested, keeps the reader on the page longer, which in turn tells Google people found the page more interesting and therefore more helpful. But that is a minimal signal to Google at best.

Keyword density has nothing to do with actually ranking your site, so it's pointless to do it thinking you'll get SEO benefits. But that doesn't mean doing it is bad. Quite the contrary, doing it is good because it'll ad variety to your page and help retain readers.

But this has everything to do with retaining reader attention span and nothing to do with SEO on any level at all. For some odd reason many fake SEO gurus, use this English Grammar rule when pitching and SEO spiel to non-English native speakers, resulting in a high rate of NOT American SEO workers thinking keyword density is an SEO thing. Whereas anyone who is a Native English speaker who attended American public schools is fully aware this is a English Grammar rule taught in grade school, which is WHY you see SEO scammers pitching keyword density to non-native English speakers but NOT pitching that same scam to American native English speakers who will see the scam for what it is.

Also h-tags are a DECORATIVE FEATURE. That's why you add colour and designs to them. Again, h-tags are a way to retain reader interest. A splash of colour breaks up the endless wall of text and wakes the reader up, brings their attention back into focus, prevents them from being bored while reading. This is WHY h-tags were invented, and h-tags were a part of html for nearly 20 years BEFORE the SEO scammers discovered you could put words in them. The vast majority of sites DO NOT put words in their h-tas, instead putting colours and stripes in them. They were never intended to have words/headings/titles in them at all. Putting words in h-tags is a fairly recent invention that no one had ever done prior to around 2015.

Google has not used static keyword rankings since 2017.

Most SEO keyword ranking advice is HORRIFICALLY OUTDATED ADVICE that has not been used by Google’s algorithm in SEVEN YEARS.

Beware of anyone guaranteeing to rank you at #1 spot on on page 1, because there is no such thing as a “number one spot” on Google, as Google did away with static keyword rankings in 2017. And there is no such thing as pages in Google search as they did away with on mobile BEFORE the pandemic and on desktop in 2022.

To better explain this:

In old style static keyword rankings, if your page ranked #1 on page 1, it meant that you were ALWAYS the first search results seen by EVERY user no matter what. Because EVERY user on the entire planet was given the exact same search results for the keyword.

Every person, everywhere on the planet, who searched for “widgets” was given the EXACT SAME LIST of websites, in the EXACT SAME ORDER.

The list remained unchanged between updates, meaning once you reached #1 of page 1, you could stay there for months or even years. Thus why these rankings were called static.

Scammy, scum bag con artists pretending to be SEOers, STILL try to promote that sort of static keyword ranking mentality, even though it has not been used by Google in nearly a decade now.

Today, search results are based on USER SEARCH HISTORY and are NOT based on keywords the website is using.

Since 2017, Google uses a user based keyword system, which scans the user's phone and desktop, looks at what the user has browsed for in the last 48 hours, and cross references that with the current keyword the user typed into search. And shows the user a PERSONALIZED CURATED LIST OF WEBSITES UNIQUE TO JUST THAT ONE USER.

So, your site will rank #1 for user A, but #57 for user B and #234 for user C, thus WHY Google Search Console gives you an AVERAGE RANK instead of a consistent single ranking.

And THIS is WHY you see ranking volatility. Because there is no such thing as static rankings.

Meaning if user A typed "tow truck" but in the last 24 hours they also typed "how to start a business" Google concludes they maybe want to start a tow truck business and gives that one user search results customized to match their search history, and puts pages on how to start a tow truck business in the top ten search results.

But user B is also searching for "tow truck" and they instead get a list of local tow truck services. Why? Because within the last 24 hours, they also searched for "car stalled" and "where to buy Volvo parts". Resulting in Google has concluded their car broke down and needs to be towed.

This is why in 2021, Google Search Console did away with providing you with a list stating what your keyword rankings are.

GSC now just gives you are list of keywords, each keyword followed by the number of times your site ranked for that keyword in the last 90 days, but does not tell you what the rank was.

It is so annoying seeing so many articles and YouTube videos and courses and so called experts feeding people false information about trying to rank a specific static number on a specific page for a specific keyword. Those scammy articles and courses and videos have not kept up to date on how Google works, how sites are ranked, and are giving people information that hasn't been used by Google’s search engine in 8 years now. (Though the static keyword method is still used by Bing, but they appear to be in the process of changing it, Bing’s algorithm was clearly updated in December 2023 and has shaken up Bing rankings just as much as Google’s HCU did in September. Whatever Google did in September, it looks like Bing just did the same thing in December, so what worked for Bing a month ago, likely will no longer work very soon.)

The entire practice of trying to rank a keyword at a specific static number (such as saying "ranking in the top 3 search results" or "ranking #2 on page 1") was completely discontinued by Google in 2017 and any SEOer who doesn't know that, really doesn't know shit about SEO and should not be making YouTube videos trying to teach others because they are just spreading old outdated information.

Also, you did not mention it, but Google hasn't used pages in well over a year now. I added this because most SEOs who give outdated advice about static keywords also give outdated advice about the existence of pages in Google search. Google did away with it on mobile almost 3 years ago, and on desktop last year. Search results are an endless scroll now, and they have been for a very long time.

In other words there is no such thing as your site appears on page 10 on Google.

Bing on the other hand still uses static keyword rankings and pages. Most of the SEO keyword advice SEOs give is BING SEO and NOT Google SEO.

But, yeah, there is no such thing as ranking for a keyword and staying there.

Ranking for static keywords was a thing that you could do in the days of Google giving the exact same list of sites to every person, and Google did away with that search method years ago.

You are seeing rank volatility because EVERY searcher gets shown a list of sites based on their search history, so even trying to rank for a keyword is completely pointless.

Because my niche is highly volatile *(meaning it fluctuates wildly from season to season and gets impacted a lot by world events, holidays, news events, etc; meaning some times of the year traffic plummets to under 1k visitors a month and other times of the year it reaches 7million visitors a month, intermixed with a lot of months that have 5 visits one day and a thousand visits the next)*, it actually can be incredibly difficult sometimes for me to tell exactly why traffic drops off a cliff one day, then returns a week or so later. My niche is in a specific sector of entertainment and relies heavily on offline events like festivals, state fairs, carnivals, ect, as I am part of the carnival circuit and my products are online available offline via face to face purchases out of tent-booths, at live events.

My products are not available online, and are all OOAK made by me. In other words I'm in a sub-set of the travel industry and tourist industry and live entertainment touring industry. If you want to buy items i make, you have to plan a trip to where I live, to whatever event I am going to be at.

Soooo.... while i'm primarily known as an author, my being an artist is my primary income, but you have to travel to buy my art, you can't just find it online.

That's why my website falls into several niches, including the travel and tourism niche, and it's BECAUSE of the travel and tourism niche side of things that my website sees the biggest amount of fluctuations. As a general rule the biggest traffic spikes and the deepest traffic cliff drop offs are both caused by the travel and tourism/live event aspect of my career.

So, things like the pandemic shutdown, the hike in gas prices from the U/R war, weather like a hurricane or blizzard hitting the region, etc, can all cause traffic on my site to fall off a cliff and sink to zero for weeks, or as in the case of the pandemic shutdown - years (2020 and 2021, saw my site's traffic bottom out simply because no one was traveling so no one was looking for tourist events to attend). Recent gas hikes means it cost me $200 to $500 PER DAY to fill the gas tank of my motorhome, meaning I attend fewer events, and canceling events also results in less traffic.

If one of my competitors (Brandon Sanderson, anything related to Harry Potter, or any time Stephen King does anything with Thinner or Christine) does anything, suddenly I get 100k to 300k visitors PER DAY, millions per month as fans suddenly search for me to find out if I'm going to be at whatever event they are at.

So, fluctuations are unpredictable and go from insanely high to consistently low in the blink of an eye, which needless to say makes it difficult to track traffic changes caused by SEO or Google updates or things of that nature.

But, sometimes fluctuations are expected and planned for.

This year for example, in May, I started a planned year long (still happening, won't be finished until next summer) massive overhaul to my website. It's a self hosted HTML site, originally built in 1996, and last had it's code updated in 2013. While I add blog posts near daily, I don't change the fundamental site structure very often.

Well, I realized, the type of code I was using was very outdated and needed an update, and I decided I wanted to change the look of the site (I made the template in 2004 - for MySpace, and just slapped it into my blog, not on MySpace), so I had to create a new template and make sure it functioned. Then I decided I did not like the url/slug-naming method I was using, meaning I had rename more then ten thousand urls, because most were long full sentences 70+ characters long, yie! And I wanted to change them to one word each under 20 characters each. Renaming page urls meant redoing the internal linking structure.

I set a goal of making these changes one page at a time, ten pages a day, and started doing it in May 2023. So, I expected traffic drops - BIG ONES - because essentially I am "deleting" pages from search engine indexes and replacing them with new pages, via renaming every single url. This means a massive amount of 301 redirects are now in place too.

Because of health issues, I had already canceled all live events for 2023, so that was also going to contribute to a drop in traffic. This coming on the tail end of the pandemic shutdowns, when only 20% of the live venues I usually attend, had returned in 2022, so traffic lost from 2020 and 2021 started to return in 2022, but not as much, which contributed to me deciding to spend 2023 fully overhauling the website.

As expected, traffic dropped off the cliff mid-May, immediately after starting the changes.

And, traffic has been weird all year ever since. Huge spike one day, nothing at all the next day; normal traffic for 3 days, no traffic for 5 days, 2 visits one day, 500 visits the next day, 15 visits 3 days in a row after that, and so on. Crazy year for traffic stats, but I expected it because, yeah, huge changes happening every day, 10 pages being renamed every day, background codes constantly being edited all over the site.

Weirdly, the August update hit, and traffic spiked a bunch, for 2 days then went back to normal.

Also in August YouTube did an update, and they changed the urls of all videos from youtube.com/url to youtube.com@username/url and that broke EVERY EMBED CODE of every video embedded on my site. Not my videos, so nothing i could do on YouTube end, but it caused Google to slap video error penalties on over 300 pages. I suddenly had 300 emails from Google one for each embedded video, telling me the page was removed from the index for deceptive practices of promising video content and misleading users.

WTF?

I go to see what they are talking about, and find EVERY YouTube video is displaying a black error screen. So, I had to go to YouTube, trace down all the videos all over again, and re-embed all the video codes. What a hassle. Needless to say those 300+ pages all lost traffic for the few days they were unindexed, and then I had to submit an individual separate validation form for every single page requesting Google submit the pages to manual human review before they would lift the penalties.

I see so many people speculate they have a penalty - believe me, you'll know it if you do, because Google sends you a message and you have to submit manual human review validation forms for EACH PAGE before Google will remove the penalty. And the annoying thing was the penalty wasn't even my fault! GOOGLE is the one who mass changed the urls of every video on their site, causing the error! ARGH! So annoying!

Then HCU came and went without a flicker.

No drop.

No spike.

Nothing.

While everyone is saying HCU decimated their traffic and a few say they got tons of traffic, I saw no change at all. For me it was like HCU never happened because there was ZERO change good or bad.

I continued on, massive edits happening daily.

Minimum 10 pages a day, more pages when I had time. And content updates as well, because I'd skim through reading the post, see a spelling or grammar error and BOOM, now I'm editing the text of the article, so a lot of "on page content improvement" happened as well.

In December I discovered I have over 500 images on my site without alt tags. Sigh. Now I have to add that to my list of things to do.

Then last week i found an error in the schema metadata that has been there since at least 2013 and now I have to go rewrite all the schema codes, probably next month, as there is so much to do ahead of that.

But, yeah, each day, I see traffic bottom out for the 10 pages I changed that day, and it takes a few days or a week, for traffic to return to those pages. Then the next day, ten more pages changed and their traffic vanishes. 

Every time.

Every page.

Every day.

All year long.

I'm kind of self killing my traffic this year big time, LOL! But, in every case so far, the traffic does return to that page usually in 5 to 7 days.

My site stats have been this weird series of cliff drop off, no traffic, huge spike, cliff drop off, no traffic, huge spike, because of the level and type and amount of changes happening this year.

So, from my experience with doing heavy duty site changes all year, yeah, it seems pretty normal for your stats to go down a lot after a big change, but then jump right back up to normal a few days later.

*(DISCLAIMER: I'm not an SEO person, just an offline combination "retail/art/live entertainment at circuit events/multifaceted local celebrity" type of branded business that built its own site, so this is based personal experience with the one site only, where the nich is the entertainer themselves, and falls in the tourism and live arts niche along with several related niches and relies heavily of "branded local" keyword searches, and may not reflect typical/standard/generic/non-branded/non-celebrity personal venue sites, SEO practices, and results could be different for other sites/niches/regions/etc)*