If you are a niche blogger focused on building a site on which the majority source of your income is display ads from Google, 2024 has not been kind to you. From Facebook to Reddit to X, the talk of the Internet in blogging has been the utter wasteland of decimated
traffic patterns caused by Google updates. Thousands of blogs from every possible niche are down as much as 90% in traffic, with no recovery in sight. First, sites were hit with the September 2023 helpful content update (HCU). This continued with the double whammy of the March 2024 core update, which contained an evolved HCU classifier (now baked within other core algorithmic adjustments), along with a spam update that ran concurrently. The last HCU update in 2023 was advertised by Google as impacting sites with identified unhelpful content. Those sites had a classifier assessed against them at the site-level causing rankings and visibility to plummet. Do NOT Give Up! Here are 5 strategies for recovery.
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