Death of my Website at Google

[sql500]

Hello friends and webmasters,

Here is a Screenshot of my international website logs from 2010 to 2019. The website was established in 2010, has SSL and is responsive, nice, clean and has took a lot of work and I never used Google Analytics:
[i.postimg.cc...]

You can see that 2015 I had around 286 visitors a day, today 2019 only 5 visitors and not even one click from Google.

Many business and traditional firms are starting to get worried, me too. And, it can hit anyone..

SQL500

[goodroi]

It is not easy succeeding online. Google piles more ads on top of the organic search results and every year more people launch websites competing for that diminishing traffic source.

You haven't said what you have done to grow your non-Google traffic sources. Google does not want to make websites popular. They want to rank popular sites. So what have you done to become popular?

You haven't said what you have done in the last nine years to make your site better than the competition. What new online tool or content do you offer that isn't on 20 other web sites? What unique value does your website provide?

For my own sites I am focusing on non-Google traffic sources. The more I grow them, the more traffic Google sends my way.

[tangor]

There's a thing call erosion (and it's counterpart accretion) that explains these kind of things.

Reality is there's more of them sucking at your niche than there used to be ... and you have not done all you can to keep your head above water. It ain't fair, but it is real life.

Another way to look at it is the locusts have descended and all the vegetation is gone, leaving a desert behind.

You have to find a way to irrigate, re-plant and nurture growth.

Yeah that sounds like feel good stuff, but it ain't that far off. What have YOU done to keep the traffic, to elevate it, to insure it continues? One cannot just slap something up and expect it to produce day after day, if nothing else, age will peel the structure and it will ebb away.

Staying on top is not easy. Staying on top after a SE change is that much more difficult.

[tangor]

@sql500 ... Welcome to the forum! Magic answers are not promised, but good thoughts and suggestions, most based in real world efforts, are there.

[browndog]

I went from 20,000 visitors a day (with around 400 articles) to 4,000 visitors a day with 970 articles. I don't know what is needed, it's a different environment to 2002 (when I started). Google is a PLC and needs to keep shareholders happy, Youtube, FB, Twitter, branded content. All of those factors weren't an issue in the past.

[Sissi]

1,518,207,412 websites in the World as of January 2019 against
155 583 825 websites in 2008.
Competition is growing

The positive side of the numbers is that out of 1.5 billion websites 1. b are from China and published in Chinese.
We should be happy that Google is not entering this market.

[Wilburforce]

Competition is growing

Not necessarily. There are more websites, certainly, but I don't believe there are ten times the number of suppliers in my niche than there were ten years ago. In my niche, at least, there have been more failures, liquidations and mergers than fresh starts (or new websites for suppliers that didn't have one in 2008).

You need to focus on what it is you are competing for. Most of us want customers, not page hits.

For all the criticisms I or anyone else may have of Google, I think what Google wants is for the searchers who want more than anything else to get your product from you to find your site, and it is your job to help that happen. My site used to get hits in the tens of thousands, but the fact is I couldn't possibly handle tens of thousands of customers. My impression, generally, is that while absolute count has diminished very substantially, relevant enquries haven't. I'm also happy to report that irrelevant enquires, while still a problem, are not as frequent as they were five or ten years ago.

Google has no interest at all in sending you visitors, or in frustrating searchers. On the other hand, giving searchers exactly what they seek creates searchers who continue to use Google as their default, which puts Google's paying advertisers in front of more people.

In most sectors I think what has increased is not competion, but noise: the increase in sites means a much bigger haystack to search for your needle in, but your searchers are looking for a needle, not hay. Your site needs to stand out from the noise, not compete with hay-seekers.

[rainborick]

Not only has the competition grown in volume, a far greater swath of the business world in general come to focus a major share of their resources on their online efforts. So, it's not just the major corporations, it's the regional and middle tier companies as well. This goes for retail and pure information sites. And much of what the big guys do in this regard dovetails with Google's signals of quality and trust. And, on top of it all, while there's a far greater audience available now, the number of "hot" slots in the search results is effectively shrinking. So, whatever your performance was several years in the past, it's pretty much irrelevant. You're going to have to dig in the trenches for traffic these days.

[sql500]

Thank you all for your great feedback.

Read what Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo wrote Oct 8, 2018 about Google, the use of Google Analytics etc:

[quora.com...]

As Gabriel Weinberg wrote, "Google is simply too big, and too powerful" and in my opinion they should be regulated.

Have a nice day.

[aristotle]

Not only has the competition grown in volume, a far greater swath of the business world in general come to focus a major share of their resources on their online efforts. So, it's not just the major corporations, it's the regional and middle tier companies as well. This goes for retail and pure information sites. And much of what the big guys do in this regard dovetails with Google's signals of quality and trust.

Those are excellent points. The sites of the "big players" (brands, organizations, etc) have steadily moved upward in the search results, pushing the "smaller players" down.

Some small players were very successful in the early years. But the big players have gradually increased and improved their efforts, and during the same period google's algorithm has gradually shifted in their favor.

[MrSavage]

If your content is useful (answers questions) then chances are your traffic is getting filtered (staying on Google). Forget about big players. That's obvious. How about shopping links? Answer boxes? Ads? More questions blocks. YouTube thumbnail links. THEN you get to that #1 result. How could those factors NOT be the "answer"? AND how could you or anyone else circumvent the filter? How to you deal with traffic being "cut off at the pass". Beating Google out of the "above the fold"? What an exercise in futility. Sure, invest more time and more money in building your brand. Meanwhile your #1 rank will be below the fold. The filter isn't going away. Point being, death of a website? Very little of that is in your control regardless of what people are trying to sell you.

Have a great day!

[RedBar]

Many business and traditional firms are starting to get worried, me too. And, it can hit anyone.

Are you a realworld business or an online infomation/resource/comparison site?

Many international realworld businesses gave up with Google years ago because Google hasn't a clue how to categorise them. Quite simply big business producers do not want enquiries from Joe Public or small buyers which leaves G in a very awkward position ... Who do they list for Product A manufactured by an OEM in Country B for a search enquiry in Country C who is looking for 1/2/3 items when the OEM only sells by the minimum thousand+?

For sure G could do a better job when the OEM has a website with all the facts and details and about the product however as an OEM for many trade widgets I certainly do not need my time wasted by JP etc.

This actually displays the naivety of the G algo in that it seemingly only delivers on the "retail" results it can supply or find and, without doubt, probably not the correct nor applicable answer that the searcher is seeking.