Well, well, well. This feels like familiar times, doesn’t it?

Yes, you read that title right, no need to rub your eyes.

The last time I ran a blog that was so badly hit by two of Google’s lovely updates was back in 2012 with that Panda and Penguin thing. I never recovered from that and I ended up starting all over with this blog.

So, it’s happened again, for what reason exactly? I have no f**king idea.

As you may know, Google rolled out a core algorithm update around June 2nd or 3rd. I’m not sure which date it was.

Anyway, after doing a quick check around the web and forums to see what kind of impact this update was starting to have on blogs and websites, I was quite stunned with the early reports.

I mean, f**k! Some big named, authoritative websites have been hit pretty hard by this update. DailyMail, NFL, Vimeo amongst the ones hit hardest.

I recently saw a post over on CCN, which was quite distressing to read. It basically explained to their readers that their website was shutting down after the Google core update.

This is sad stuff, seriously. How can one single company, like Google, who think they own the internet, can have the kind of power that they have and basically abuse that power.

Yes, I’m sure those updates were needed, but the pure fact that website owners were in the complete sodding dark about what kind of update this was going to be, is sad and bad business.

We had zero time to prepare for this, or did we?

Of course, there were winners as well as losers.

So, how did Magnet4Blogging do?

Well, as the title suggests, I lost around 35% of my total monthly organic traffic.

Yep, my traffic dropped almost overnight, like a sack of sh*t, as we say in England.

That’s got to be bad for business, right?

Well, I supposed so, yes.

Check these graphs out:

I’m pretty sure that the income I generate from this blog this month (June) will reflect the drop in traffic numbers, but I’m feeling pretty positive still. I’ll wait until the end of this month to analyze the situation better.

What changes have I made over the last 12 months or so?

Absolutely f**king none.

I haven’t changed a great deal on this blog/site over the last 18 months even, other than create new content, which for the most part, I think has been valuable and resourceful. You may think differently, otherwise, I don’t know. But I’ve done my absolute best to give you as much value as I can.

I don’t do much in regards to blog marketing and promotion. I don’t do guest posts, and I don’t build backlinks.

Sure, I may not have the social shares and comments to show, but engagement on my preferred social platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube has been pretty positive.

I also have an active email list that I use to send out newsletters from time to time, which just proves again that building a list is so important.

Plus, I have web push notifications set up so that I can happily promote my content and offers to my audience when I need to.

How will I fix this?

I’m not quitting, but at this point in time, I have no idea what I’m going to do as I don’t have a great deal of knowledge as to what kind of update this is.

It seems that the only thing most SEO experts seem to know is that this is just a regular Google service improvement update which is f**king useless information for webmasters.

Whatever kind of update this was, it was huge and has had a massive impact on a lot of sites and blogs.

Until I have a clearer idea myself, I cannot make any specific fixes. All I can continue to do is create good content, and that’s about it.

I recently cleaned up my backlink profile and disavowed a bunch of links that have plagued this blog for a while, whether that will do anything, I have no idea.

Let’s just wait and see what happens over the next few. Maybe I’ll have a better understanding of it all then.

Lessons to be learned by this update

1. Never, ever put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t solely rely on Google for your blog growth, blog traffic, etc. Create other reliable streams of traffic (email, social, web notifications).
2. Continue to grow your email list like your f**king life depends on it. This really matters.
3. Pull in audiences from your other platforms and mediums, i.e promote your blog content on YouTube and share it with your subscribers. Create a podcast and grow your subscribers on iTunes, etc.
4. Build other online businesses as well as your blog. I’m so glad I did this for myself. I run a few other online businesses, an e-commerce business, and some niche websites that haven’t been affected by this update, yet. I think it’s essential to build other forms of income streams online to supplement your blog.

So, BIG question time:

Has your website been affected in any way, positively or negatively, by Google’s June Core algorithm update?