←back to thread

186 points nafnlj | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.41s | source
Show context
firefoxd ◴[] No.46241861[source]
Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified.

1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking.

2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my search page. Basically people were searching for crypto and scammy websites on my blog. Odd, but not like they were finding anything. Turns out, their search query was displayed as an h1 on the page and crawled by google. I was basically displaying spam.

I don't have much control over ai overview because disabling it means I don't appear in search at all. But for the spam, I could do something. I added a robot noindex on the search page. A week later, both impressions and clicks recovered.

Edit: Adding write up I did a couple weeks ago https://idiallo.com/blog/how-i-became-a-spammer

replies(3): >>46242006 #>>46242043 #>>46242457 #
1. motbus3 ◴[] No.46242457[source]
I posted some details in the main thread but I think you might need to check the change in methodology of counting impressions and clicks Google did around September this year.

They say the data before and after is not comparable anymore as they are not counting certain events below a threshold anymore. You might need to have your own analytics to understand your traffic from now own.