The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites

imagine being featured as a Google success story only to have them tank your sight's traffic the very next day we actually had a photographer in here shooting in our kitchen and the next day we woke up and we had lost 75% of our traffic and Google Revenue overnight Google search algorithm updates have crushed countless small businesses and Charleston crafted was no exception felt like everything we had worked for for a decade had just been taken away from us it was very much a hit on my self-esteem like I wasn't actually good at what I thought I was good at Google even flew Morgan to their headquarters to hear her story but despite their explanations she left with no real answers and more importantly no clear path forward they said you have done nothing wrong this was not the intention everyone who is here has a good website they owe us an explanation and they owe us recourse I do not want to have a business that's dependent on Google anymore hi how's it going I'm Morgan I am half of charlson crafted we share DIY home renovation ideas woodworking builds and projects you can do to craft your home into your dream home you want to build a step stool let's do it I worked for the federal government for 11 years doing public relations and social media so then with things like woodworking is this something that you've been doing since you were a kid or like no I'm completely self-taught everything I've learned in this business has just been through trial and error and a couple of YouTube videos when I need them so ready to stand up on it kind of nervous look at that it's good to go what do you feel makes charlest and crafted unique so we really focus on very doable DIY projects and of course so much of what makes it unique is just us and our story and our family is woven into everything we do we don't build things just to build them because we think it'll be a hit everything we make is to serve our family and to serve our home and so our story is really tied into our work as well Morgan and Sean started their blog as a passion project but soon realized it had the potential to become something more a business that would change the course of their lives our first sponsor project was for cat food and they paid us $100 I can't even tell you how excited we were I told everybody I knew that we got paid money to put something on the Internet and we did that for a few years we were putting out five blog posts a week it was a lot of work and so it kind of got to a make or break point for us cuz we both worked full-time we had to either start making a little money or just peel back on the amount of work we're putting into it cuz even at that level it is a lot of work at a Crossroads unsure whether to go all in Morgan attended a DIY creators conference hoping for direction what she found were game-changing strategies that could transform her site's future I didn't know how people got ads on their websites that never even occurred to me but we met medine we got ads on our websites and we were automatically making multiple thousand dollars a month I took a class on SEO I never had heard of SEO before I didn't know anything about it going to that conference was the turning point where we realized that we could keep doing what we were already doing but actually earn money off of it armed with their new found skills Morgan was ready to put them to the test what happened next was beyond anything she had imagined a near instant success during Co there was this big viral thing where people were making squirrel picnic tables we saw as an opportunity this is the first time we ever kind of hopped on a trend people saw it on Tik Tok looked it up on Google how to build a squirrel picnic table found our plans signed up for our email list I mean our traffic was huge and it really showed us the realities of going viral what that can mean in 2023 when you were reaching kind of the peak of that traffic Point how much were you making then last year we made about $325,000 about half was ad Revenue I mean it's like four times how much money we made when we were both working it empowered me when my son was born in 2018 I was a CPA and I was able to quit my job be home with him so it changed my life in that way for the better so the it sounds like the recipe you took was to create blog content based on search focused topics and then to optimize that page and then it was just a repeatable machine that was printing cash for you yes Morgan had found a formula for Success so she doubled down so I created a new website which is celebrating with kids I had a lot of kids toy reviews kids crafts I created a website about house plant care and a website about paint color a lot of lot of people thought I was a little bit nuts for doing that and for managing that especially without a team I mean that is what I've learned in this business if you find something that's working lean into it as hard as you possibly can and then be willing to Pivot when something quits working just when everything seemed to be falling into place Google pulled the rug out from under them September of 2023 Google released the helpful content update in 10 years we had never been hit negatively at least significantly by a Google update overnight in September my three secondary websites lost 80% of their Google traffic and that was the same percentage of Revenue luckily Charleston crafted was Untouched by The Helpful content update you know I came up with a lot of ideas in my mind about why these sites were hit was it because they were newer was it because they were really made for Google content it was still real content but the intent was totally different than with Charleston crafted and it was really hard for me I took it very personally because this was my work this was a reflection of what I did and I think it was really something that I had convinced myself that I was really good at so to have the rug sort of pulled out from me felt like oh I guess I'm not that good if you had to use one word to describe what you were feeling in that time what would it be despair total despair because this was it this was like our whole basket we ended up pulling my son from the school we had him enrolled in because we felt like we didn't want to be on the hook for a large tuition it was stressful on my marriage my kids didn't understand my friends and family don't understand cuz they still don't understand how we even made money to begin with felt like everything we had worked for for a decade had just been taken away from us um and we hadn't done anything wrong they featured us as a Creator success story on their website the worst part was in March 2024 they do a economic report and it has a section on each state in the country and a business that has been profoundly affected by Google positively and we actually had a photographer in here shooting in our kitchen during the renovation and the next day we woke up and we had been hit by the March core update and we had lost on Charleston crafted 75% of our traffic and Google Revenue overnight I had this sort of false sense that we were really well Diversified business because we do ad Revenue we do affiliate sales sponsored work um we sell digital products but when the traffic went away people stopped buying digital products because they weren't landing on our site certain brands stopped wanting to work with us because we didn't have the traffic that they were looking for it affected everything when we lost the page views soon after the traffic decline Morgan received an invitation she never saw coming so I was invited to the Google Creator Summit I was flown out to California to go to their Google headquarters it was so empty so vacant when they took us on a tour it felt felt very much like here's Google here's all your traffic and the dust might blow by but we did get the opportunity to learn about Google search and share feedback on what we thought they could improve but while we were there they were very clear they said you have done nothing wrong this has been far more extreme than we intended everyone who is here has a good website and that sort of turned to switch in me in the way that I approached the rest of the day I went at it as I've done nothing wrong my content is good you've told me my my content is good Google's told me for years my content is good I'm not doing anything wrong the problem is with Google was there anything that Google said that resonated with you or that gave you hope for the Future No we were told September's traffic is not coming back and that meant September before the helpful content update even if your site appeared on Google again you were not going to get the same level of traffic you were getting before there's been so many changes in the search results there's AI overviews there's so many additional things in there you can scroll forever before you get to a Blue Link now I do not want to have a business that's dependent on Google anymore Morgan and Shawn had every reason to resent Google they'd taken away everything they'd built but ironically it was also the key to their success I wanted to show her that SEO didn't have to be an all or nothing gamble that there was a way to make it work on her terms can you kind of walk me through the process of of what you started doing here because even for the previous 8 years we don't see anything like this where we see a real growth trajectory yeah so I think we started choosing topics to write about based off of what we thought would perform well on Google I used search console primarily to see terms that we were ranking for so at that point in time I started putting out a lot more roundups so you'll see a lot of best different paint colors and wood stained colors yeah so we did a lot of wood test stain testing and then we took that content that we created and created a lot of different blog posts the best gray wood stains the best light brown wood stains the best dark brown wood stains same content just sort of organized in different groups I think that's really cool because naturally with any keyword you're trying to rank for there's always going to be competition and if 60% of your traffic is coming from two or three posts and somebody comes in out ranks you you've lost everything right like basically what you're doing is you're taking like an investment strategy of compounding growth M Morgan Had A Clear Vision for Charleston crafted and was implementing smart strategies but when I looked at her paint color I spotted an opportunity that just might help bring back some of her lost traffic oo um you went crazy on that content there huh yeah I cranked it out man I mean this site was making like $4 to $5,000 a month off entirely Google revenue from what I can see here is you have some affiliate links yes and you have ads are those the two ways that you you were making money through here and and digital products I have a whole shop oh really so you can see I sell I have 287 paint color p paletes wow so every blog post that is about a paint color you can purchase a palette I sell these every day they still selling oh yeah wow I sell $1,500 a month in these from the site from the site wow and you have like next to no traffic the subdomain still gets traffic oh it does I think that's the thing with e-commerce though is that you don't have to get a ton of traffic because it's so commercial the people who were there are there on purpose yes I set this up after the helpful content update um and they're all on Etsy too why don't you I don't know if this would work move your blog content to your subdomain it's diabolical well you don't have to move everything just like looking at some of these pages so like let's look at some of them that were at the peak so best green gray paint colors I don't see why you can't move this over to the subdomain I'll try um so with any kind of testing like what you want to do is you don't want to move everything as it was okay but do things in stages the way that I understand it is that Google treats main like your main rout domain and subdomains differently okay and there's these conspiracy theories that they're getting rid of affiliate sites and they're focusing on eCommerce sites cuz these are people who own the products and you already have an e-commerce store right so why not try to create content there and rather than focusing on monetizing through Affiliates MH focus on just selling what you have yeah and like if you could get just driving more views to those palettes and I bet you I bet you that if you got this traffic back or even half of it back to your subdomain but the focus is around promoting the palletes which you probably talk a lot about in the content anyway I bet you'll make more money from that than you would have through ads and affiliate combined that's a really cool idea yeah can't hurt to try I'm obviously biased to search like it's been a big part of my life since a very long time ago I've also gone through the motions of of losing a lot of traffic and a lot of money because I rely too heavily on search a a good way to look at search is you're not so much creating content for the search engine yes but for the people who use the search engine right because there's a lot of people who still want to find you hundreds of thousands millions of people I hope so I hope they can find me you're helping a lot of people out there I think so we get a lot of emails from people with pictures of projects they've done in their home because they had our instructions you know and I like it when people do a project for the first time and then they send us something else they did that wasn't necessarily following our instructions but by building a project with detailed instructions they were able to build the confidence so I know we're helping people I know it Google can't take that away from me but they can just take it away from the people we could be there to serve after spending the day with Morgan she left with hope and a plan ready to rebuild but just days later everything changed our site had seen a moderate recovery in the November core update and then the December core update hit and that was all gone and then some so we are down to just crumbs of Google traffic pretty much nothing left coming in from Google but despite the situation Morgan recognizes the value of the skill she gained and what they helped her build I would say that building our business on Google gave us a way to reach a lot of people and taught me a formula for creating content really consistently to get really comfortable analyzing my own data it definitely did teach me a lot about myself and about data especially if you want to learn how to get traffic from Google then watch our free SEO course for beginners right here on YouTube