Traffic Way Down Since Monday
Wednesday's traffic is 30% down on the previous Wednesday. 2022 has turned out to be the worst year for traffic since 2017. The decline started in June last year and never recovered.
No recovery this afternoon either as US traffic kicks in. For me, every year, traffic used to ramp up in September. Starting last year, this hasn't happened. In fact there were no surges since June last year, with traffic flatlining over 15 months.
I think that you may be getting your mythology confused, Rupert?
Cassandra was fated to accurately prophesize future events, while all around disbelieved her.
The contrary to Cassandra would be make wrong predictions of future events, while all around believed you.
This is brutal.
I'm praying to eke out enough views over the next 8 days to make payout. 
Mine seems to be continuing to get worse by the hour.
Still falling. I notice my best traffic article has been pushed down from about 5th place to 31st place for the same two search keywords.
Here's another example. Something's seriously flawed. Do Google ever give advice to companies on request about what's wrong with their sites or they just spout vague stuff about sticking to their webmaster guidelines?
Total traffic still dropping. Interesting that it seems to be a linear drop.
Can anyone remember what the update was in June 2021? That's when my traffic dropped sharply and never recovered.
Edit: A core update it seems. There were spam updates later in the month.
Crap! Traffic still falling.
I've been updating a lot of my articles on another account. The editor is adding a lot of images and videos as he reviews them. He is doing a really great job and the articles are certainly better for his effort, but I do wonder if it is impacting load time and if this is something editors consider.
More supporting media make articles better, but I always tried to balance it with considerations for load time.
Even when using ad blocker, pages seem to load in kind of clunky with weird spaces.
I don't know what the right answer is. Sometimes it feels like if there is nothing we can do about it we may as well just try to forget about it. Hate to think of it like that but, you know.
Is there a new update kicking off? Traffic dropping again.
There is still hope. But the bad periods have got longer and the good times shorter in recent times.
My earnings for this account I'm writing with are just a third of what they were in the first half of 2021. That's bad.
It's those damn core updates!
Last month my surges netted me almost enough to plug the gap caused by the general decline (the rest of the gap was filled with money from a particularly good Medium month).
So financially, it's potentially worth it. (That said, most of the extra money was reaped from a single freaky surge that peaked at 16,000 views/day or something like that).
Of course, the best surge is an Amazon article, but that almost never happens (aside from the naturally occurring Xmas traffic increases, which isn't what I'm talking about here). The second best surge is one that's chasing a high value keyword and that can happen. I wouldn't worry too much about low value keyword stuff like maths articles, if money's the issue.
Inducing a surge is ju-ju though, I'll admit. I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of wearing amulets and reciting spells.
Sometimes I can make a very minor alteration (one or two words in the text) and the article will soar the next time it's crawled, at least for a few days. Most of the time nothing happens, though.
I guess with some articles, Google detects a change, gives it a bunch of extra traffic to see how readers react to the new version, so it can collect stats.
I have some articles that seem to have a tendency to surge big time, they've done it several times, so I'm focused on them.
What do I do?
If an article is fine as it is, my changes are minor.
Obviously, if there's room for improvement, then a more substantial edit is done.
That's it.
I leave the rest to the ju-ju gods.
I'd still prefer a general recovery though. I'm just feeling a bit desperate nowadays.
"I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of wearing amulets and reciting spells."
Works for me
Well, you're just weird!
I had some that went up.
I wish I knew why.
Maybe the competition just got punished more harshly and it wasn't directly to do with the articles.
On the other hand, I think that Google deliberately makes things complicated and has a degree of unpredictability. They don't want people to figure out simple formulas for playing the system.
That used to happen in the early days, but it's rarer now.
When I look at the traffic stats graphs, they can seem almost random sometimes, especially when I compare them with each other.
What one really needs is a massive amount of info. That makes it more feasible to figure out what works and what doesn't. HP has that. I don't.My Halloween articles were doing so well last month, but now I am observing a sudden drop in traffic; I don't know why. I hope it gets better soon!
Sad but true.
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