The Backlink Dilemma: Is Google Really Paying Attention?
After 17 years of dedicated blogging, I find myself in a challenging position. Throughout my journey, I’ve faced significant algorithm shifts, including notorious updates like Panda and Penguin. However, the past year has been particularly punishing, resulting in an alarming drop of 80% in my Google traffic.
What’s perplexing is that my blog is filled with valuable content and benefits from a robust backlink portfolio. To illustrate, consider some of the esteemed sources linking to my site:
- Hundreds of backlinks from Wikipedia
- 16 mentions in The New York Times
- 10 links from The Guardian
- 3 from the BBC
- 25 from Business Insider
- 6 from Bloomberg
- 9 links from Yahoo News
- 4 from NPR
- 2 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 54 from the Huffington Post
- 23 links from NASA
- 17 links from the Daily Mail
- 4 from The New Yorker
- 81 from Buzzfeed
- 51 from Stack Exchange
- 23 from Weather.com
- 30 from Smithsonian Magazine
- 4 from Khan Academy
- 2 from National Geographic
- 232 from Atlas Obscura
This is just a fraction of my link profile, which boasts over 110,000 backlinks from approximately 8,000 domains. Despite this impressive network, it seems that Google is indifferent, gradually diminishing my traffic with each core update.
Today, I find myself scraping by, unsure of my next steps. It’s disheartening to witness years of effort reduced to mere shadows. The question looms large: What’s the path forward when the system seems rigged against you? I’m at a crossroads, contemplating whether it’s time to throw in the towel.
If you’ve faced similar struggles in the ever-evolving landscape of SEO, I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences. What strategies have you employed to adapt? What does the future hold for bloggers like us in this unpredictable digital terrain? Let’s engage in a conversation and seek solutions together.
I don’t think that this is the true nature of your problem. The truth is that the written blog is what is suffering because Google want to replace it with Gemini’s live AI content, rather than what anyone has written in their blog. Google are concerned (justifiably so) that they will be unable to remain a central repository index with the rate at which AI will generate content. Soon we will be seeing live AI generated webservers that will always give the latest information and so they will not be indexable. Google will have to mitigate this by anbswering the query live on the search engine results page (SERP) rather than display a set of results which will undoubtedly be out of date. This is an expected survival action by Google as the AI content quality is improving as we speak and will soon be superior to anything anyone can write.