As I’ve run a series of not-so-helpful content based experiments in this domain over the years, the organic web traffic has ground to a halt when Google rolled out their Helpful Content Update (HCU) over the course of the past year.
There were a few experiments I was trying here which did work, and there is some insight to be gained from this.
One thing which did work was running translations – including multiple English language translations – and tailoring important content to each region (for example Americanizing spellings); it was this tactic which garnered many hreflang intact backlinks to blogposts like this somewhat facetious one, about how I made “the fastest website in the world”.
It was interesting to watch when I turned off those translations which were in all honesty, quite painful to maintain, that, despite replacing the hreflang backlinks with 301s, and removing all the language variations, the traffic dipped and never recovered.
I gleaned from this the insight that having good translations (and having good natural backlinks to translated versions) lifts all versions in all regions, and that proper canonicalization is better than a 301 link.
Another thing I was doing on this site for a long time was running it all AMP. That is Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google stopped showing lightning bolts for such content ages ago, and they posted some stuff which caused (mostly lazy) SEOs and web developers to basically say “ah Google says we don’t have to use AMP!” so everyone just acted like it didn’t exist.
I thought I’d leave it running on AMP, firstly, because most major media serves AMP pages.
One of the primary benefits of AMP is that the whole page is a piece of downloadable HTML, which can be completely served by a third party – i.e. Twitter, or Facebook, or by Google itself – this has the huge benefit of very fast loading times everywhere an AMP is cached.
The other reason AMP is like a cheat code, is you are not allowed to bloat your pages with javascript and an array of trackers. Indeed, I don’t run any form of analytics on this website. I don’t really care to measure how many visitors I get, and I don’t, therefore, need to request your permission to place tracking… because I don’t. This is very fast, as a result.
However, I’ve taken the decision to remove AMP as I pare down this site once more, in an effort to see if it is possible to recover rankings on a website which has been tanked by HCU.
Lastly, for a long while, I was running a lot of affiliate content in this website. I’ve cut all of that out of here. Most of that was experimental stuff for other websites. I’ve seen sites like Forbes and the Daily Mail and the Telegraph running overt affiliate content which is only tangentially relevant to their websites for many years… I wanted to see how well it would rank while considering this type of content for commercial contexts, however, of late, Google has (quite rightly) cracked down on this, which now has a name, and it is parasite SEO.
Why parasite? Because it’s “reputation abuse” and the affiliate content is leeching off the reputation of the rest of the domain (let’s say a huge news site with lots of quality backlinks) in order to serve only moderately useful affiliate content, like voucher codes, or “article marketing” like the early days of the web, which are basically review posts pointed to products via affiliate links.
Really, what I should have been doing all along, is making Reddit. So leave a comment underneath, and I’ll drop in the Social Forum schema.org stuff and see if we can make this thing fly again 😉