Google advises website managers to produce pages of good content, then they’ll magically rise to the top of relevant search results. However, this is nonsense. I’ve written many pages of technical tips, all of which are useful for getting computer users out of trouble, but in July 2021, Google decided to change their algorithm for ranking web pages. As a result, my daily appearances on Google Search and Google Maps both plummeted. At first I wondered what could have happened to reduce my position on Google so badly, but then I realised that it was nothing I’d done wrong, it was just Google moving the goalposts yet again. Thanks very much Google for damaging my business, just as things were starting to edge back towards normality.
Apparently the main focus of Google’s change was to demote ‘link spam’ content. My website has no ‘link spam’ and I’ve never engaged in any kind of ‘link scheme’ in an effort to be noticed more widely and often, yet I got severely hit by Google’s latest changes anyway. I’ve been working for literally years to get ranked highly on Google, but I’m fed up with putting in a large amount of effort only to get knocked back. Google have a tremendous amount of power over businesses, both large and small, but I’m beginning to think that I might be better off going back to the old-fashioned practice of printing and distributing paper leaflets, just like I did when I started. After all, there’s no way that Google can ruin that for me, and the less time I spend pandering to Google’s whims, the more time I’ll have for doing real work.