11 Comments

• Posted on Nov 19 2019

  Comment removed by Moderator.
• Posted on Nov 13 2019 at 15:00 by boglarka

  Very useful, thank you!
• Posted on Nov 10 2019 at 16:31 by henningdane

  Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the insight! I run a small family business and have noticed in the passed year my website hits have dropped massively and no changes or link changes have been made to it. Would you be able to recommend an on the ball website builder in the UK or elsewhere who could tweak my website to these new criteria mentioned in your article? Thanks again! great work! Henning www.tacotruck.co.uk
  • Posted on Nov 11 2019 at 14:39 by jonathanmorton

    Hi Henning, you could contact Mike Pead from Primary Image. He's based in the UK, has WordPress expertise and is a Statcounter member. Some more about him and contact links here: http://www.azulabo.com/success-stories/mike-pead/
• Posted on Nov 9 2019 at 10:27 by Lynn

  I agree with Donna. Google is ripping off content creators by showing the content on the search page without a user having to click through to the site. I can get hundreds of answers to my questions by simply clicking on each of the answer snippets shown under "People Also Ask" without ever having to visit a single website! How is that helping a small business? No wonder my hits have dropped to almost nothing! I've done all the "right things" for my sites and my web traffic is almost nonexistent. I am of the opinion that building content websites in 2019 and beyond, at least for me, is becoming a complete waste of time.

  Comment edited on Nov 9 2019 at 10:28
  • Posted on Nov 10 2019 at 01:36 by skygroove

    Absolutely right! But not only that, since the latest algorithm updates the organic search results have taken a dip for the worse like never before. In fact, they don't make sense at all and only crap results show up in the top as long as they come from what Google think are authoritative websites. Content is NOT king, and when it is, it's being swamped by click-less advanced search results that keep the traffic trapped in the Google page while ripping off webmasters. Hope people will start switching over to Bing and DuckDuckGo, they are not so nefarious, at least for now.
• Posted on Nov 7 2019 at 04:16 by xrt43

  The basics still count. Content is still king. Using at bare minimum 4 H tags, category specific keywords, an "economy of words" approach to writing, quality back links, hi-def images, etc. Don't bother trying to keep up with google's latest online marketing fads and trends. Like many if not most of google's service offerings, since the beginning, fads will either change dramatically or disappear entirely, and right when you least expect it. Search results pages are starting to resemble facebook pages, and not in a good way.
• Posted on Nov 6 2019 at 05:30 by Donna Barstow

  That was a good point in the beginning: that searchers want answers before content. That really hurts us as authors! I've had a presence online for 20? years, but never saw that I have a Knowledge Panel there before, so thanks for that. I did get pretty riled up, however when Google's instructions to update or fix it include verifying YOURSELF - and to do that they want a selfie with a government -issued ID! Who do they think they are, the police? KGB? Big Brother? And why would anyone give that info to any online business?? I wrote a letter to their legal dept complaining about that invasion of privacy and the fact that the Knowledge Panel itself is stolen intellectual property. (Can you tell that one of the issues I write about is privacy? :) )

  Comment edited on Nov 6 2019 at 05:32
• Posted on Nov 5 2019 at 21:55 by steinhop

  looks like Google is taking over the internet! I have a travel blog website and try to block google to access my site, I do not want to be listed in their index. my .htaccess is pretty big :-) # Google Cloud subnet blockieren deny from 35.187 deny from 35.195 deny from 35.205 deny from 35.240 deny from 104.199 #Google Cloud einzelne IPs deny from 35.187.160.194 deny from 35.187.186.254
• Posted on Nov 5 2019 at 17:06 by keithkeogh

  So confusing,
• Posted on Nov 5 2019 at 08:38 by Marco

  I think that SEO got very hard but also very simple, you just have to provide useful stuff.