Google Core Updates got your traffic down?

Google Core Updates got your traffic down?

In March 2024, Google made a major change, or Google Core Update to its algorithm. In other words, Google changed how it looks at websites to determine the quality and relevance of search results. This severely impacted websites like mine which went from ranking well on Google and subsequently getting traffic, to not ranking. By not ranking, I mean that when someone googles something like “how to find a free carfax report” they would have found my site before March. Now, they would not find my site. You can imagine what that has done to the ad revenue. In short, it’s gone.

Several factors play into why Google thinks a site is good. Nobody fully knows what it takes to rank highly on Google, no matter what the salespeople try to tell you. People devote entire careers to unraveling this mystery. Why? Because if you rank highly people will visit your site. If people visit your site, they will see your ads which pay based on traffic. Conversely, if nobody visits your site then the ads do not pay. Sadly, everything about the website still costs money, such as hosting, talent, etc.

What Can My Website Do to Rank on Google After Core Update

This writeup is my experience. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’ve made marked improvements. This assumes that you have some experience in blogging and self-hosted Wordpress management. I may skip something important, and if I do please feel free to reach out.

Removed Expired Posts

One ongoing debate with bloggers is whether or not to delete old posts. On one hand, you don’t want Google to see a bunch of no-longer-working links. So, it seems reasonable to leave them. However, after two years we had more than 9,000 posts on Freebfinder.com alone. That’s a lot of dead weight. So, I painstakingly deleted 100 at a time, all of the old, expired posts that were never going to be relevant again. This meant actually looking at them and researching to ensure that there wouldn’t be a reprise.

While it’s somewhat defeating to spend three days deleing two years of hard work, the reality is hoarding blog posts doesn’t do you, your visitors, or your site any good. Google seems to see it as 9,000 irrelevant posts that have no quality. That will hurt your overall search engine optimization (SEO).

Delete expired media

My crew posts between five and 30 posts every day. Each post has at least one picture in it. That’s why I had over 13,000 pictures on this poor, bloated, bogged-down website of mine.

I reached out to my host about an unrelated-to-media problem, and they mentioned how incredibly huge the site was. I will say, Siteground chat support has been very patient with me.

So, I set out to find a Wordpress plugin that would help me delete unattached images on my Wordpress website. Media Cleaner by Jordy Meow does the job very well. And, it stores media in its trash, versus immediately and permanently deleting media as Wordpress does. That can come in really handy if you realize that you deleted things yesterday that you wish you hadn’t. You can just restore them from the trash. And, like Wordpress, WP Bulk Delete keeps trash for 30 days and then empties it automatically.

Media Cleaner also has the ability to delete the image along with the post which is a huge timesaver that I didn’t find in time.

Rewrote, refreshed, and updated relevant posts

This was probably the most time consuming. When all the deleting was done, we had about 1,000 posts. Many of them were what we call evergreen – meaning, they don’t expire. We also have lots of roundups for things such as 300 Companies that send Coupons just for asking and 500+ Birthday Freebies you can sign up for. So, it goes without saying that they take a long time to go through and update.

Check out the SEO section in this article, and also spend some time learning about keywords, how to write blog posts that will rank in search engines, and how your content is king when it comes to being one of the first results on Google.

Removed ALL A.I.!!!!

When artificial intelligence (AI) was all the rage, everyone flocked to the beautifully written prose that could beef up their blog posts with little effort. It seemed that more information was a GOOD thing. It was helpful, insightful, and rounded out the knowledge given on a website.

But, where one website might use it to make their site more robust, thousands of others were generating nonsense and getting paid to click-bait people into visiting. The experience was not great, and Google saw it and made the massive change in March to its Google Core Update.

Unfortunately, AI detectors are just as artificial as AI composers. So, if they detect AI it doesn’t matter if it is enhancing the website experience or not. It is flagged, and penalized in search results.

We’re not there yet. The absolute best thing you can do is write your own material, 100%. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts.  There are AI detectors that can help you identify what might appear to be written by AI. A few of my favorites include Scribbr, and Content Detector. There’s also one by Copyleaks which I do not recommend. Copyleaks has a plugin for Chrome browser, but it misses what the first two caught. The Chrome Extension doesn’t make it all that much easier to use, and it’s not worth the lack of detection in my option.

As long as I’m on the subject, I also found AI Humanizers that you can pay for to write your content and skirt by AI detectors. I’ll save you the long answer: don’t do it. I naively thought that using AI to add value to my website would be a good thing, but Google thought otherwise. Most AI Humanizers make you sign up first – or worse, sign and AND pay first. I did a few test runs and results were very unreliable.  Humanizeai.io – “the world’s best AI Humanizer and convert AI to text,” according to them. But, again, I do not recommend it.

How to Write Blog Posts with AI

Here’s an example of Canva’s Magic Write AI generator. I gave it a prompt to write a short paragraph about why you shouldn’t use AI in blog posts or risk ranking poorly in Google.

AI can be very insightful and come up with many things that you may not otherwise think to cover in a blog post. For that reason, AI can be a useful tool. However, machine-generated writing when not overseen by human intelligence can go very wrong.

I took the AI generated blog post from Canva and pasted it into Scribbr’s AI Detection which is free to use. As you can see, it knew that this paragraph was generated by AI.

 

 

Then, I went one step farther and pasted the paragraph into HumanizeAI, which rewrote it in a more human tone.

It sounds better, but unfortunately, Scribbr STILL KNEW it was AI generated. That is why I highly suggest you write your material yourself!

If you want to use AI, use it to research. You could ask AI to list the top 5 reasons not to use AI in your blog posts and use the list to write a blog post yourself.

Deleted Rank Math SEO plugin

This list is in chronological order of how I worked on repairing my website after the Google Core Update in March absolutely destroyed my website ranking. But, if I was listing things by how important they are to do, removing Rank Math would be number one.

For me, the whole AI thing started on my site when Rank Math added AI to its list of pro features. But, let me back up and explain. Rank Math is a search engine optimization tool similar to Yoast and SEO Press. They have a free and paid version of their Wordpress plugin. It’s plug and play, meaning you can install it and check a few boxes, and get optimized for search engines out of the box.

Rank Math introduced its new AI pro feature and offered a sweet deal on it, so I bought it and tried it. Naturally, I opened up one of my top-ranking posts to see what Rank Math AI would say about it. It suggested all kinds of weird things, rewrote things, and just basically seemed wrong. To clarify, RMAI didn’t “do” anything, it made suggestions and it was up to me to use them or not use them.

Unfortunately, I went with it. That was in January and February. Call it bad timing with the Google Core Update looming about a month away in March. Or, call it bad luck. Or, karma. I don’t know. I started my website 14 years ago and have put in my blood, sweat, and tears through thick and thin with this. It’s my baby. I take offense to them suggesting that my site is low quality.

But, it probably is low quality in their eyes. Because their eyes are artificial and they’re just blindly detecting AI… which I admittedly used. Sure, I was trying to enhance my site. But, that’s not the way it went.

If you’re new to search engine optimization, I recommend that you do a bit of research on your own. SEO is a big deal that website owners really should know about. It changes all the time. There are volumes of books, tons of videos, and even college majors on the subject. In short, SEO is the things that you do to try to rank highly in a search engine search. So, if your website or blog post is about turtles, when someone searches on for turtles on a search engine they will find your website. Note that I didn’t say Google this time, because there are several different search engines to think about.

Installed SEO Press

When my site took a nose-dive after the Google Core Updates of March 2024, I realized that RankMath AI, a pro version I bought and paid for, was probably at least somewhat to blame. I removed Rank Math after backing up my redirections and then installed SEO Press.

SEO Press is ranked second behind Yoast as the most popular SEO Wordpress Plugin. Rank Math comes in third. Before RMAI I had been using the free version for a few years. Before that, I used Yoast – both paid and free – for several years. I found Yoast was good, but slowed down my website. I liked Rank Math because it didn’t slow down my site.

To import redirections in SEO Press, you will have to upgrade to a paid version. So, I bought it.

Removed Siteground Optimizer

So, my site is all cleaned up and I’m ready for the search engines to come see me again. Except, after asking Google to rescan and revalidate my site, the checks all FAILED. The Core Web Vitals reported that my site was loading too slowly to give a Good User Experience.

One reason I’m not overly thrilled with Siteground Optimizer is that it doesn’t optimize pages until they’ve been loaded by someone. So, if it’s a new page/post or if it hasn’t been visited recently, it’s not cached. I know that’s how caching works but that doesn’t help my load time with Google. So, I needed something like NitroPack and NitroPack conflicts with SG Optimizer.

Website load speed is a HUGE part of SEO. If your site takes too long to load, search engines will penalize you. See, they’re trying to give their users the best experience by finding sites with relevant content that have a good user experience.

Think of it this way, if you sold tortillas and wanted to partner with someone who sold taco meat you would want it to be high quality. If it was just so-so, you probably wouldn’t bother with them because their poor-quality product would make your product seem lower quality.

All this to say, my website needed to speed up. It was slow loading. There are a few metrics that might be more technical than you ever wanted to know, but SEM Rush has a great explanation of  Core Web Vitals (and a free trial):

The Google Core Web Vitals include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the largest content element on the page to load

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how much the page layout moves around unexpectedly as it loads. Like images or buttons shifting.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures how much time it takes from when a user initiates any interaction to when the next visual update is displayed

You can also visit Pagespeed Insights to test any web page load speed. This is a good idea to do before and after you install a new plugin like NitroPack.

Installed NitroPack

NitroPack is a WP Plugin that claims to be the best at speeding up websites. Of course, I don’t just take their word for it. My research found many happy customers who raved about NitroPack’s ability to do just that.

Speeding up your website can help you:

• Increase conversion rates;
• Provide a better user experience;
• Gain an edge over competitors.

With NitroPack, you get everything you need for a fast website, in one place. Features like caching, image optimization, and a CDN are ready to go out of the box.

NitroPack works with Cloudflare but not with Siteground Optimizer.

Cloudflare Workers

If you have Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) like I do, you will want to configure NitroPack to work with it using API. Don’t let that scare you, NitroPack has easy step-by-step instructions with pictures to guide you through this. It took about 5 minutes to set up.

I went one step farther and bought workers to help my site run faster.

Important: While both NitroPack and Cloudflare support Global API Key, we strongly recommend using the API Token. Global API Key has multiple limitations related to resource access, shared permissions, and lack of advanced usage limits. You can read more here.

Perfmatters vs. Asset Cleanup – which is better?

If you ask 100 website developers, you might get a variety of answers. Perfmatters seems to be the overall choice, and it costs half as much as Asset Cleanup. However Asset Cleanup does have a free version. The problem is, I needed bits and pieces that were only in the paid version. So, I went with Perfmatters. If you use discount code PERFMATTERS you’ll get 10% off. Or, use MASTERYBLOGGING for 20% off.

Hosting

If you host on Siteground like I do, you’ll want to turn off the Siteground Optimizer as I mentioned above and run NitroPack for the best results.

Core Web Vitals

Google Search Console‘s Core Web Vitals reports will give insight into things your website should focus on to rank better in search results.

And, once you’re done making improvements you can ask Google via search console to re-test your site. From Core Vitals, choose Open Report in Mobile (you can do Desktop later) and then view the results. If there are problems, fix them and then return.

To request a new review, tap on the issue and tap on Validate Fixes. This process can take several weeks to complete.