Hi Stéphanie! Wow, that’s crazy you lost 80% of your ad revenue on a 14 year old blog with 160K page views 🤯 I’m really sorry to hear that. I can’t imagine how crushing that would be to have an algorithm change affect your revenue that much. It is taking Google quite a while to get this sorted out, but I fully believe they will get it turned around because they have to. There’s no way Google can keep their search results in their current state and expect to be the “top” search engine in the world. They’re not helpful at all and showing some bizarre results above actually helpful pages from expert blogs.

That all being said, I do always recommend bloggers diversify wherever they can and not put all their eggs in one basket. For example, I have my blog which generates revenue through affiliate marketing, I have a YouTube channel which covers many of the same topics (combining blog posts with videos), I sell digital products, and I have an email list. That way, when you do have an extended period where organic traffic has majorly slowed from a Google algorithm update, you can also focus some time on other outlets to produce some revenue.

Wishing you luck!

Hi Edy, really sorry to hear you’ve been hit hard by the HCU as so many other bloggers have. Some of the Reddit results that are showing up for product reviews, comparison posts, or even informational posts are really really bad. They are either incorrect, not comprehensive, or pointing to some video that is 2-3 years old. It’s really odd what results are showing above the truly helpful posts from expert niche blogging sites. I don’t think anyone could look at the Google search results right now and tell you that they’re truly helpful. Google will get it sorted out, but it does take a while to make major changes like this.

Hi Stacy! You’ve been blogging even longer than I have. It’s crazy how much doom and gloom talk there is that I’m seeing in multiple other blogging groups. That’s why I used the analogy of an actual depression (referring to the stock market) because people are behaving very much the same way. They think there’s no hope, selling everything, doing crazy things to their websites that are only going to hurt them more, etc. Google’s search results are not helpful at all right now. Stay the course and keep creating content that is helpful for people 🙂 Google will get it figured out.

This is an excellent article. Thanks!! I’m in the same boat. I see Reddit overtake my article, and I don’t even find it helpful. People comment on Reddit to sound important, but the answer is plain wrong. Visitors should instead read my article.

I have an article that ranked in the top 5 all year long last year. This year, however, the article disappeared from the SERP—I mean from the top 100—several times and bounced back to the top 5.

As you know, it’s not funny to lose traffic. But overall, I’m not a victim of the last “helpful” update. It’s not over yet 🙁

Hi Doug,

Thanks for reading and taking the time to leave a comment! Glad you enjoyed the article.

1. The class “.kt-inside-inner-col” is still the only class being used on the inner column that we need to target in this situation. I do believe they added an “.inner-column-[#]” class, but that’s actually at the same level as the “.wp-block-kadence-column” class (which is the parent of .kt-inside-inner-col). So, using the .kt-inside-inner-col class is still necessary for this.

2. I’ll have to play around with using CSS Grid instead of Flexbox as an alternative solution. Thanks for the tip!

Jake

Thanks Alexander! Glad you enjoyed it 🙂

I just checked on my end and it looks like I can access chat through a number of different avenues depending on what area I’m having issues with in my site. I do know that they’ve somewhat “hidden” the live chat feature behind documentation to make sure there isn’t an article that could answer your question before contacting chat, but their chat has always been super helpful and knowledgable when I’ve needed to use it.