How Mike Dinich Recovered His Blog To 1.5 Million Monthly Page Views After a Google Core Update

Mike Dinich from Wealth of Geeks is the latest guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast.  It’s the second time he’s been on the show, and today he's talking to our Niche Pursuits podcast host Jared about how to recover from a Google core update.

The personal finance blogger started his site in 2018, and within 12 months was hitting 700k monthly visitors and, not long after that, 5-figure revenue months. Mike has tons of knowledge, tips, and experience in building a successful blog in a competitive niche to share. But especially important, is that he knows how to deal with a Google core update and a significant drop in traffic, which is what happened to his website shortly after quitting his job to go full-time in 2020.

Mike offers some helpful advice and tips on what to do if your website sees a drop in traffic after a penalty from Google. He puts it all out there on what to do, covering content, speed, core web vitals, and whether you should pay attention to the page speed insight tool.

In addition, he has some interesting thoughts on using AI technology, writing guidelines, what Google is looking for with regards to content, and so much more.

Some of the main topics discussed by Mike Dinich during the episode Include:

• The worst thing you can do if you get hit by a Google update
• Where to start with your recovery after a Google punishment
• Importance of user experience
• The main reason why his first website got hit in 2020
• Switching WordPress themes to recover a website
• The WordPress theme he now uses
• Questions to ask yourself regarding your content
• Tips to improve your content and make Google happy
• Using HARO for creating better content
• How to use Google Trends to find data and unique content ideas
• The tool he recommends to improve your writers
• Why writing as a blogger is a different process than other writing
• Updating content correctly for better ranking 
• When to ditch content from your site
• Plus much more

Besides the above, Mike talks about links and their role in Google update recovery. He gives his opinion on the type of links needed to get your blog back on track.

Finally, the conversation touches on Mike’s mastermind group, his successful finance blog, and a deeper look at what Google is looking for from websites. He also details the blog's monthly page views to date and what happened when he changed his domain name for the blog. 

As you may be aware, Google core updates are hitting more and more people all the time, so knowing how to recover is crucial; be sure to take notes and enjoy the episode.

Links & Resources Mentioned During The Mike Dinich Interview

• Wealth of Geeks (Mike Dinich Personal Finance Blog)
• Mike’s Mastermind Group
• How Mike Dinich Built A Succesful Blog With 700k Visitors Per Month (Previous Episode)

This Episode is Sponsored by One Little Web & RankIQ

watch the full interview

read the full transcription:

Jared: Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and today we are joined by Michael Dinich. Michael. Welcome.

Mike: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jared: You know you, so you're, uh, a returning guest, your first interview was really, really popular. Um, and, uh, you're blogging over at, uh, let's see.

So it's wealth of geeks used to be your money geek and really the last podcast we centered all around. How you grew that today, we're talking, um, Google core update recovery. Uh, now I have a couple things I wanna mention at the outset, but before we do, maybe bring us up to speed a little bit on the background of why you are so well qualified to talk about, about this topic.

Mike: Okay. Well, we were hit with a Google core update back in, uh, may of, uh, 20. And it was, I, I had, uh, pre just earlier in that year, January of that year is actually when I left my day job to blog full time. Oh geez. And so, you know, we're only a few months into it and I was sitting there thinking that, uh, we're going to double our traffic in, in may cuz it's the anniversary, uh, amaz the anniversary of our website and I'm thinking that we're gonna double traffic and then my traffic, instead of doubling, I get cut in half, you know, almost a half, about 40%.

So I went into, um, really kind of beast mode to kind of figure out why the website got hit and how I could kind of recover from it. Um, you know, because it was my livelihood and uh, it's so scary when it happens and you know, these Google updates they happen about once a year now. And you see a lot of chatter with like the blogging Facebook.

SEO groups, everyone kind of panics about Google updates. So I really want to prevent anybody from kind of panicking and throwing in the towel when they experience a Google update. So I think it's really important to kind of, you know, share with it. And you know, some of the steps that we've taken to recover from the update.

Jared: Yeah. That was that one that hit right at the beginning of PA of the pandemic. I remember that one and it was like a double whammy because everybody's, uh, you know, traffic and, and metrics were all outta sorts. Ad revenues had tanked because of the, the, the, the global pandemic. And then Google hits a big update.

I think Amazon cut commissions at the same time. That was a, I don't wanna say a dark time, but it was a troubling 

Mike: time for a lot of people. It was, yeah, it was, you know, bloggers were, uh, and, and, you know, ditch site owners were, you know, just getting assaulted from, you know, every possible direction and, you know, and that's always hard, you know, when you have a lot of variables going on, figuring out.

What to do is, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there. 

Jared: So let's just let give a, a little bit about Google updates and kind of center around some of the topics for the day. And then we'll kick it over to you for, for really the nuts and bolts of the day. This topics really APRO, no matter when you're listening to it, probably, but certainly we're coming on the heels of a really large update that was launched by Google, um, towards the end of may of 2022.

So we're recording this summer of 2022, but the, the, the Google broad core updates happen, like you said, usually like one really big one every year and maybe another one or two. So every, maybe a couple a year in total, now this is different than the consistent tweaking that they do with their algorithm.

These are these broad core updates that they, they usually will, uh, announce to us and tell us, Hey, we're doing this big update. Usually affects the variety, the, the majority, sorry of search queries on the internet. Um, and you can see really. Really changing results on your website and kind of like what you mentioned, it can be really overwhelming if you lose a lot of traffic.

And there's a lot, especially if you're new to this with a new website and it might be your first time getting hit by an update. It's actually probably more common nowadays than a lot of, um, a lot of people were let on back in the old. Five 10 years ago, you used to only really get swallowed up in an update.

If you were doing something really wrong with your site nowadays, it's really common as they tweak search intent and these types of things. So recovery and going about a process to recover your site is really important because you can recover that traffic. Um, uh, it's very difficult sometimes to determine what to do, but you can recover that traffic.

It's not, um, the end of the site as you. And that's really what we're talking about today is what to do, where to start, how to analyze what things to pay attention, to what things not to pay attention to. Okay. I've said my two minutes on core updates. no, that's great. 

Mike: Yeah. And the, and the big thing, the big thing with a Google core update is, uh, if you think you've been hit with a Google core update is not to panic.

Uh, you know, that's where most bloggers, you know, kind of go wrong or site owners go wrong is they, they panic when a update happens and then they start canceling, they start canceling all their subscriptions. Mm-hmm , they start, you know, they take their foot off the gas because they go, well, you know, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm gonna stop pinning.

I'm gonna stop paying for tailwind or whatever's driving traffic. They, they just cut back on it, cuz they panic. And that's absolutely worst thing you can kind of, you can do. And Google, you know, actually tells people kind of what to do when you've been impacted by a, an update and they give guidance.

It's a little cryptic and you have to kind of read the tea leaves and everything, but, you know, if you've been impacted by an update, it's really important to just kind of reflect and be honest with yourself and, and your site. And just start, you know, just start with like a checklist of almost the blogging, you know, basics.

And so the first thing you want to kind of start with is check and see, you know, do you have, is your website fast? And are you PA you know, passing Google's core web vitals, are you passing, you know, the page speed insights test, and you can go right into, you know, Google search console, and Google will tell you, right in Google search console, if your site is passing or failing, Core web, you know, the core web vitals and you can, you know, you can get a lot of traffic and be failing core web vitals.

You know, there's a lot of big legacy sites, you know, the balance and MSN and, and stuff that tend to get away with, you know, having bad core web vitals, but for people that are maybe, you know, struggling to recover from, uh, you know, struggling to recover know, uh, core web vitals is a really good place to start and see, you know, uh, if there's any speed issues or anything.

And also, you know, if people, if the site's running slow and people click over to your site, you know, they could possibly leave, so it could be hurting your traffic. So I always start with kind of the fundamentals and, uh, make sure you're passing, you know, core web vitals and make sure you have a good user experience.

And yeah, that's another important thing is really make sure and just reflect on it. Are you actually serving. A good user experience when people click onto your website, you know, are they being hit with an ad right away, you know, or, or are they, you know, being able to get into your content? One thing I really like to do is make sure that there's not really anything impeding the reader from, you know, getting into like the hook and you know, of the, of our articles of our blog posts.

So we don't want to have, you know, any real ads or popups or email subscriptions, anything in the first paragraph, our first couple paragraphs of an article, because we don't want people to kind of bounce out because they're not getting served, you know, the information right away that they kind of clicked on.

So you just have to kind of reflect on it and be honest with yourself and ask, you know, are you serving the best user experience possible? Is the website is the website. Uh, you know, are readers getting, you know, serve the information they're looking for and just kind of go back to the, to the basics. And, you know, sometimes that costs a little bit of money and you might have to, you know, hire a developer to help work on some of the page speed issues.

Maybe you need to upgrade to, uh, you know, more expensive hosting plan or a better hosting environment. Uh, but you know, speed is a ranking factor. Google's come out and said, it's a ranking factor. So improving those factors will help in recovering, recovering from a website. So back in may of 2020, when I was hit, I think that that's probably what was hurting me the most was, you know, my website, when I really kinda looked back on it, you know, wasn't as fast as it could be.

It was, it certainly wasn't as fast as it was now. So we went through and we stripped. You know, pretty much anything from the site we didn't need, we stripped from it. You know, if it wasn't really serving a purpose or making us money, we stripped it from the, we stripped it from the site. Uh, we stripped some things like to just felt we could live without.

So for example, like the table of contents plug in, we actually stripped that because you know, it was, uh, causing issues with Google page speed insights. We moved to a best, better hosting environment. We tested about five or six different themes until we finally settled on a, on a site that was fast. And then today we're passing on the core web vital.

Jared: So let's talk about some of the actual tactical things you did to improve the site speed. You mentioned, um, a site theme switch. Do you remember which one you landed on? Um, how you evaluate it, right? Like, cause you can go through the WordPress store and start looking, but how did you kind of evaluate which ones with the fastest you actually download all of them and test 'em all in terms of a real time environment or, you know, what was the process?

Yeah, 

Mike: I actually, I absolutely did. So we started out, I started out with an, um, I started out with a theme, a Suki, which was, uh, a theme that was, uh, supposed to be very lightweight. And then basically what we found is it was a little too lightweight. So by the time you started trying to build any of the functionality or anything you needed into it, even though it was a great theme, it probably works for some people mm-hmm by the time we tried to get what we needed out of it, it was now it was no longer, you know, light.

So we then switched over and I think there might have been another theme in between that, but I don't remember, but then we switched over. 

Jared: That's a really good point by the way, because you kind of quickly went through it, but you're exactly right. Like, uh, and just for people listening, it's a great point.

Like some themes are lightweight, but they come with virtually nothing that you can, that, that included with them. And so you have to add a bunch of stuff, but a bunch of additional plugins to get the functionality you need. Whereas some themes come with more functionality built in and are still lightweights.

Great distinction. Yeah, 

Mike: absolutely. And then we went to a, another theme. I forget what that theme was, but then that was a little too bloated. Then we went to, uh, Astrid the Astro theme. And what we were finding was with the Astro theme. And again, that's, you know, probably a nice theme for a lot of people, but we were running into issues with the logo populating into the header menu and the header than expanding when the lo our logo would pop into the site.

And when the logo would expand into the header section, it would push all the content down and it was causing us to fail on content load shift. So we tried going in and modifying the CSS and, you know, getting it to work. And after hitting a few, um, you know, hitting a few, uh, roadblocks there, we decided to then switch over from Astro.

We switched over to generate press, and that's kind of the theme that we've landed on now. It's, it's a great theme. It, you know, kind of does what we need to do while still being, you know, very, very fast. And, you know, it's a very popular theme and it's well supported. And the one thing, you know, we, we really kind of started focusing on, especially cuz we have a couple, you know, we own a couple other websites now is really standardizing what we use with all the websites.

So that way, you know, we're not necessarily looking for what's perfect. We're looking for what works and what works for us. And then by kind of standardizing and using similar themes, similar plugins with all the sites that we work with, then we're able to understand what's going on and dag diagnose a problem.

Like if one of the sites is failing well, we know we use similar plugins. We know we use similar things, so maybe something's going on and we're able to diagnose those pro problems where if you have, you know, 20 different sites and they're all using a different theme, they're all on different hosting environments.

It makes diagnosing problems and absolute, uh, you know, absolute nightmare. So we landed on generate press, cuz we just like it. It's well supported. They're developers were familiar with. And it runs really fast. 

Jared: Yeah. I feel like when you hear about kinda lightweight fast themes nowadays, you hear about generate press.

You hear about Astra. Those are probably the two, I don't wanna say most popular, cause I don't know, but it certainly feels like it. And 

Mike: people have really good luck with cadence, the cadence theme as well. Um, the cadence, the cadence is a little prettier. You know, you feel like a prettier theme. We've seen a lot of bloggers.

We know that are having good luck with, with cadence. We just chose, uh, gen press. It's a little simpler, it's a little faster, you know, in our, you know, for our kind of, you know, the way we have it built out 

Jared: site speed wise. Did you, when you determined in may of 2020, when you kind of determined, this was one of the big problems, were you comparing your site speed and maybe the, um, Google page speed insights or some other metric GT metrics?

Were you comparing that up against your competitors and trying to evaluate, Hey, they won, we lost their site speeds faster. Were you, were you going about it that way or were you really more just looking at the site. Looking at your core web vitals analyzing, um, from a, just a generic standpoint. Um, and I'm, again, I'm just trying to think of people wondering what, how do I know if paid speed is my issue or is something that I need to really work on?

Yeah, we did. 

Mike: We were mostly concerned about Google and, and Google paid speed's insights and the rankings and core web, uh, and search console. And it's really funny cuz we talked to a lot of different developers at the time and kind of tech gurus. And a lot of people said, well, don't worry. Don't worry about what Google says in page speed insights, because I ran this report in GT metrics and it says, you're fine or don't worry.

You know, we're just told a lot of times like, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. And I didn't feel comfortable with that because you know, I'm not, I'm not a blog, you know, I'm not a tech person, you know, I'm like the least tech techy blogger that ever existed. So, um, but just something about it, I just kept, I just couldn't shake this feeling that it's like, well, this is a Google product.

The Google product says I'm failing. And Google is saying that this is a ranking factor. And so I kept thinking like, well, I don't really care what some SEO bro says in the Facebook group. Like Google's saying, this is a factor. I don't know how much of a factor, but it's a factor to some extent, and I'm not passing their tools.

So I really, I wasn't worried about what other people were doing and listening to other people say, it's not a, you know, not a problem to me. I was like, well, if Google sets the standards, And Google saying, I'm not passing their standards, I'm gonna figure that out. And so I just kind of kept going back to that page speed insights tool.

And I mean, we would, we would change plugins and go back to the tool and run it again. You know, we would change themes, go back to the tool and run it again. And eventually we got it to the point where, you know, passing, passing the search console. I, 

Jared: um, uh, we, I run a, a market agency for, for a living and, uh, whenever it comes to, to site speed, uh, and us talking to clients about it, the typical response, not always, but a typical response is I use the website all the time.

It's super fast and I have to remind people you're probably cashed. You've probably visited the site frequently enough to where all the images and whatnot are casted. And so you're getting a much different experience than your first time visitor is getting. And then that can also be a problem when you're actually making page, uh, page speed or site speed updates, because.

You have to clear the cash out in order, oftentimes to get a fresh score, a fresh page speed score and stuff. So that can be a challenge in doing that, um, and getting, getting good results. So. Okay. Well, um, okay. We we've, we could probably talk about site speed for quite a while longer, but let's, um, let's move on.

What else? Outside of page speed, you got that page speed dialing, you switched themes. You, you tested plugins, you got page speed, dial in. What else was part of your recovery process? So we went, we 

Mike: went back and really kind of focused on the basics and I just kind of actually just reread what Google actually says a bunch of different times about what to do if you're impacted by an up by an update.

And I just did an honest reflection on the content on the site. And I asked myself, you know, is this content the best possible content we could, we could produce? And when I was being, you know, kind of honest with myself, it was, you know, good content, you know, I don't think we were publishing content that.

You know of poor quality, but it wasn't really the best content I think, you know, that was out there. And so we went in and we changed our content, uh, standards, and we brought in editors and we adopted this process where we now have a two editor sign off on all of our, all of our content. And, you know, it costs a little more, it costs a little more money, but I, I think it leads to, uh, us producing better content.

Now it doesn't mean that a mistake, you know, we push out a lot of content every day, so a mistake could happen, uh, but it's cut down on them significantly. And I think it's made, you know, much, much better content. So we have one editor that loads the content into the site. So, you know, we get the content from writers.

Uh, I don't do any of the writing on the site anymore. I was gonna ask that. Yeah. So a writer will send in, send us a post, and then it goes to the first editor. The first editor loads, the post into the website is responsible for, well, first they review the content to make sure it passes our guidelines. If the post doesn't pass our guidelines, it gets sent back to the writer.

And what we've done is we've created a, um, we've created guidelines, writer guidelines. Do we give our writers and that spells out, you know, how. Uh, you know, how, you know, uh, capitalization should appear on the website, you know, how things should be italicized, all, you know, all our standards. We require that all of our writers run their posts through Grammarly premium.

Okay. Uh, I absolutely love Grammarly premium, especially if you can't afford, if you can't afford to hire an editor right now, I mean, Grammarly premium is, you know, like an editor and it's, I think 140 bucks if you pay for it for the year, it's really, really, you know, inexpensive, uh, you know, Grammarly.

Premium's not perfect. Uh, it does make some mistakes sometimes, but it's really, you know, it's great. And in particularly Grammarly premium will help people. Um, you know, even that are great writers, it'll help them become better bloggers. So sometimes we get a few people that write for us and maybe. PhD, you know, candidates.

So they're really smart, you know, really smart people. Uh, and then the problem is, you know, sometimes they think, well, I'm a PhD candidate. I don't need to run my post through Grammarly premium. And then they write these sentences that are like a paragraph , they're just like really, really long. And, you know, blogs are, you know, written, you know, blog.

Blogging's not really journalism, you know, it's kind of different, you know, blogs are written to be skimmed scannable, you know, most blog traffic. Most of my blog traffic comes from mobile, so it has to look good on mobile. So you want like short sentences, short paragraphs it's, you know, the antithesis of everything.

You're kind of taught in, you know, grade school, you know, and, you know, with, you know, five sentence paragraphs. So. Grammarly. Premium's not only great just for catching like grammatical errors and stuff, but to start kind of forcing people to write shorter, more concise, it'll catch, you know, inclusive, you know, inclusivity things in different terms.

So we, we require that all the writers use Grammarly premium through the post. Then they send it to the first editor, the first editor then loads it into the site and then they do another, you know, run through Grammarly premium. They also use their own kind of editing experience and everything to make sure it, you know, passes our guidelines.

And then once they approve it, they hand it over to another editor who then has final sign off and then publishes, publishes the post. And what we found as you know, when we started. Implementing that kind of editorial process and it costs more money. We've gotten more relationships with media partners.

We've gotten more websites that have reached out and asked us to, you know, syndicate their content, which is basically them republishing our content on their site with canonical link back to our website, which is great for SEO when that happens. Uh, you know, we've gotten positive results and everything from our readers, and we've found that our content ranks better, you know, people stay on the page longer, uh, you know, all the metrics have kind of improved significantly when we've adopted that editorial process.

So even if it means, I think slowing down in your content production, you know, uh, in publishing the less posts each month, or, you know, each quarter that, you know, if you can push out better quality content, I think that that's really important, especially I, I suspect, you know, if we read the handwriting on the walls and read some of the things that Google's come out and said, You know, Google is really starting to go after thin content.

Now, thin content doesn't necessarily mean content when you hear thin content, people think, well, that means 300 word blog posts. Yep. That's not really the case. Thin content could be 1500 words, but it's just rambles and it doesn't say anything. It doesn't add anything new to the conversation. And, you know, Google wants to make sure that, you know, if they're showing 10 different sites in the 10 research search results, they wanna make sure they're, you know, 10 different, unique pieces of content that are valuable to the reader.

They don't wanna just see 10 sites regurgitating each other's content and not adding anything to the discussion to the narrative. I mean, Google's really kind of come out and said, you know, they're kind of going after this kind of stuff. So by having, you know, editors review the content and, you know, make sure that it's better quality than a lot of the other kind of content that's out there.

So I think that's really important. And the other thing too, is I think that with a lot of, we're seeing a lot of this, uh, adaptive and artificial intelligence come out with, with writing. You know, I know Spencer's experimenting with AI, uh, on a site, which is really kind of cool, but you know, Google really doesn't wanna see people, you know, robots just producing the artificial intelligence, right?

Like Google's not gonna like that until they figure out how to do it themselves and get rid of us all . So, you know what I mean? So, you know, having a, you know, an editorial process ensures that that content is well written and that Google's able to differentiate it from, you know, something that's artificially, artificially written or something that's maybe, you know, hired out on fiber or, you know, content that's maybe of lower quality.

Jared: So you kind of, there's a, uh, there's a, there's a catch there in what you talked about. Meaning my site's been hit. Your site was hit 40, 50%. And, you know, you can start a new editorial process, like what you talked about going forward, but you know, at the same time with your site being hit, there's now less income coming in.

There's less revenue coming in and it begs the question. Did you go back and do that to your older articles that were published? Or was this just something you started doing going forward? 

Mike: Yeah. Oh, that's a great question. I'm sorry. I explained it. Yeah. So absolutely. So I went through everything that lost rankings.

Okay. Okay. And, and I went through, I went through all the content that my top performing content that wasn't getting traffic as much and went through and incorporated that process. So I went through and I updated all those posts with, you know, with Grammarly premium. I went through and I updated, you know, all of them.

So they're a little, a little better. Um, I shortened actually some of the content up, which was, you know, kind of surprising to me. Um, but I found that we have a lot of content from, or earlier days. Of kind of blogging where they were maybe, you know, maybe it was listical, but it had a very, like, you know, 10 ways to do, you know, 10 ways to save money or something, but maybe the intro was really long and it was had like a little too much narrative to it.

And I actually kind of started stripping some of that kind of content out, improving the grammar. And again, it was just really about improving that reader experience, you know, how can we hook the reader right away and give them what they want as fast as possible. I mean, we all kind of joke around about food bloggers that, uh, you know, tell these really long stories about their grandmother's apple pie, right.

And then, and why it's the best apple pie ever. And people just want the recipe. So, you know, we really kind of, you know, used that and kind of thought about my own content and said like, am I getting people to their answers to their queries right away? Is it the best quality? And so we went through and, and really started focusing on those posts.

And then when we would update the post, we'd revise it, we would update it and we'd republish it with a new, with a new date and time. And, and that really helped to, you know, re recover and, and move those posts up in rankings. 

Jared: Yeah, it's a really great point. Actually, it brought to mind a story of, uh, I was just thinking about, uh, we did, we were working on a site for a client about a year ago with that.

Um, I think it was like the June or July, 2021 update. That was a pretty big core update. And what we found with a lot of their articles was ironically. And if you ran it through like, um, like a content analyzer, like maybe a surfer or something like that, this type of thing, wouldn't show up, they were answering the question.

In the article, they were answering what the query was about, but they were doing it way too far down the page. And when we looked, we saw that people who are winning in the SES and in the updates, they were getting to the point a lot quicker and they were answering the question a lot quicker. And, um, you know, it really speaks to what you talk about.

Like, you're, at some point, if you really care about recovery, you're gonna have to open your site up. You're gonna have to read the articles and, and try to have as unbiased of an opinion on them as you can. Can I ask you about, about that? Because that's like, there's so much nuance in evaluating your content and how, like, outside of some of the tools you talked about and the process you went through, the editors you, you put in place, like how do you truly evaluate content, especially if you're the one who wrote it, um, for how good it is.

Like, do you have any other insights on. 

Mike: Yeah, it's it, you know, that can be, that can be, that can be really hard because nobody wants to admit that like their contents, maybe not that good. Um, it kind of helped that I've, I've never felt that I was a writer, so I've always been like, kind of critical of my own of my own writing.

So like 

who 

Jared: caught on to me, they finally realized I'm not a good writer. Yeah, they 

Mike: right. They, they caught on to me. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, so that's always kind of helped, but it's really, it's really tough to, to kind of, you know, do it, but, you know, we would just kind of go through and I would say like, is this market watch quality?

Right. You know, cuz that's, you know, or a business insider. And I would just kind of look at it and I would say, you know, does this feel like what I would see on market watch? Or does this feel like what I would see on business insider or is this, uh, bloggy? And, and I don't mean to use that in a, a pejorative term, but.

You know, I've always tried to avoid my, you know, our content to extent possible, try to avoid them being too bloggy and go with a more, uh, more of a editorial like, you know, market watch business, insider type feel mm-hmm to them. Uh, and I, I really adapted that philosophy from, we talked about this in the, uh, last interview we did, we talked about how I, you know, when I grew this, I, I used Reddit a lot.

Right. And Reddit is very anti blog. And so what I found was on Reddit, that if you, um, you know, if you're posts are really bloggy, tors will, you know, destroy them. But if your posts are, you know, less bloggy, more editorial feeling. Then, you know, they tend to do well. So I always kind of like use that kind of litmus test and kind of ask myself, does this feel editorial?

Could I see this on an MSN, see this on a market watch? Mm. You know, or even, you know, an entertainment site or, or whatever, you know, Collider or, you know, comic book writer, whatever. Could I see this being on their sites? Or is this a little too, a little too bloggy? And then if that's the case, I would just try to kind of edit, you know, edit that out.

And it's, it's tough, you know, cuz nobody wants to kind of pick on their own on their own kind of content. And, and I think that there's this hope that we have sometimes this content producers that if we just kind of put the content out there and leave it alone and don't update it and don't, you know, revisit it and stuff, eventually it'll just come back.

Right? Like the hope is, well, you know, it's only a loss if I edit the post or if I delete it or whatever, you know, you know, but sometimes with underperforming content, you know, you have to update it. And then it also kinda gave me an opportunity too, where I looked at it and I said, looked at the content.

And I said, if this isn't worth me going through and paying an editor to review this or review it myself and put it in gram, you know, put it through the tools and revise it and republish it, then I'm gonna remove it from the site. And I would say like only remove content from your site. Very, very sparingly.

Like I think a lot of times people will get hit with a up update and they wanna just start going and cutting all the content from their site. Like, I'm not suggesting that you remove content from your site, especially if you're not 100% sure what you're doing with it. But if you are, you know, implementing a, you know, a strategy to increase your editorial standards and you really look at a post and you say like, look, this is, you know, it's outdated.

I'm not gonna invest the time or effort into it to fix it up. It doesn't have any links. Then it could make sense to just delete that content and remove it from your website. So, let me 

Jared: ask you about, uh, cause you kinda touched on it a bit. Let me ask you about, um, so some people I'm not trying to draw, like there's two sides here, but I'll position it two different ways and maybe you can talk about which direction you went.

Um, a lot of people went updating content perhaps for an algorithm update or just as part of a regular content update process. They'll, they'll take their, um, article and put it into a, like a tool like a surfer, a phrase, a market muse, and they'll really work on getting their, um, their topics in line and then their optimizations, their densities, these types of things in line, based on what the articles that are ranking right now on Google have.

Um, now that does tend to create a more vanilla approach to, to, to, to articles in terms of like, Hey, I need to make sure that my article has the components that the top ranking articles have. There's another approach that would maybe live on the opposite side of spectrum that says. In order for my article to rank, I need to have something in there that makes it the best article on the internet.

Something unique about it. Something that no one else is doing. And I need to go into my article and make sure that it's the best available on the internet because of this maybe unique component. Obviously you can also kind of do both, but maybe touch on which, which of those did you, do you, did you kind of go down?

Which road did you go down? Well, 

Mike: we kind of, uh, did a little bit of both. Okay. So, um, and, and I'm glad you brought, I brought that up cause it's something I want to kind of talk about and you know, tools are really cool, but it it's just like anything, if you used properly, you know, a tool can be wonderful, but if you get in over.

Your, you know, your knowledge level or experience level with the tool, you can end up doing a lot of damage. So the one problem with like a lot of these tools to create these content briefs, or, you know, look at the top ranking articles and they look at those articles and see what they include in them is not only does, does it maybe lead to the content being a little vanilla, like you mentioned, but also you could be picking up problems from those other, other sites, you know, posts.

So, you know, just because the five posts that are ranking on Google mention, you know, ABC company, you know, doesn't mean necessarily that you need to mention ABC company in your article, maybe ABC company, you know, maybe that's not why, you know, Google likes that post, right. Maybe mentioning ABC company is why those posts are in spot, you know, five, six, and seven and not spot one and two.

Right? So you, you have to be careful. You, you know, you're not picking up problems from those kind of websites. And then the other thing too, is like, I think, you know, you're probably not gonna be able to outthink Google, right? Like, you know, so Google probably has, you know, like, I guess maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I actually picture like in a room someplace, there's Google engineers testing out this SEO content and, you know, tools and figuring out how it works.

Like, I, I wouldn't be surprised, right. If they have some rush and they have all these kind of tools and they create content briefs and they, you know, incorporate into that into their AI detection or, you know, link building detection or whatever. Right. So, um, so I'd just say like, you know, be careful with those tools that you're not picking up problems, but definitely use those tools.

So I always like to instruct our writers and when we're writing own content is, you know, do good keyword research, then write the article that you feel needs to be written first. Right. Then once you write the article that you feel needs to be written first, then you can maybe go and run it through some of those tools and pick up a couple of those things.

And, and sometimes the tools are great because like, let's say maybe you wrote, uh, you wrote a, a post about, uh, apple stock. And you didn't use the term like 52 week average, right? Well, you know, you're gonna go well, well, of course, that makes sense. I'm gonna put that into the article, you know, how could I miss something, you know, low hanging fruit or whatever like that.

So, you know, sometimes those tools are great, but it could also, you know, encourage you to put things into the article that, you know, uh, might actually damage you. It might actually hurt, like, you know, I know like a lot of people will do with, go with, uh, SEO is they'll just go and they'll search a term, find whatever questions are currently being asked.

Uh, and you know, people also ask section and then incorporate 'em into the fact section of their blog. And that's awesome. And that's effective from SEO, but I also suspect like Google can figure that out too. Right? Like I think Google can figure out, like, if you're kind of scraping, scraping is not the right word, maybe, but I think Google can kind of figure out if you're just copying what is already there and not adding anything unique to the conversation.

So. That leads me to the next thing. And I think it's really important that you come up with unique content for, for your, uh, for your post. So even if you're gonna use a tool like that, let's say you're gonna write, uh, a post on the best small SUVs out there. And so, you know, everyone's going to have a, you know, everyone's gonna have very similar articles on the best SUVs out there, right.

There's only so many SUVs and only so many of them are gonna be the best. Right. So, you know, how do you come up with something unique to add to that article? Well, you can go and you can generate unique data, right? So you can go and you can use Google trends and you can find out. You know, you can put in, you know, best SUVs and find out what people are kind of searching when it comes to SUVs and add, uh, unique data to the article using, you know, Google trends.

Uh, the other thing is, uh, expert quotes like ex getting expert quotes for your article are, is absolutely great. And last, you know, last time I was here, we talked about using Harrow for a link building service, but you can also use Harrow as a content generation service. So if you're writing an article about the best SUVs you can go in and you can put in a horror request and say, Hey, I'm a journalist or I'm a writer with, you know, ABC website.

And I'm looking for mechanics to comment on, you know, the best, you know, you know, SUVs or I'm looking for, you know, automotive enthusiasts to comment on the best SUVs or, uh, You know, car salesman or whatever, to comment on the best SUVs and get some, you know, get some quotes from those people. And, you know, not only, um, is that great for just, you know, adding something unique to your article, especially if like you're an affiliate site, let's say you're maybe an affiliate site for, you know, TVs and you wanna do a Roundup of the best TVs, right?

Like, well, you know, how do you stand out comparative to Amazon and all those other places, you know, get, you know, enthusiasts to comment on their favorite TVs or gamers to comment on their favorite, you know, TVs for, uh, gaming. So horror is great for getting that unique content, but then also with horror, uh, when you comment, you know, typically when you quote somebody into article they'll off, often share that article on social media.

They'll sometimes link that article. So now they're becoming your ally and they help you promote the article as well. So it's a nice, win-win, it's a nice way to get content. So what we like to do is we like to get count, you know, quotes, uh, for as much of our content, as we kind of can from Harrow. If we're doing a post, maybe on the entertainment side, that's like the best books, then we'll, uh, you know, go on har and ask, you know, for authors to comment on, you know, what, you know, are you an author?

What are you reading this summer? We wanna know, and we'll do the best, you know, summer reads, according to authors this summer, or, you know, film a, you know, filmmakers, what are the best scary films for Halloween, you know, that type of stuff. And so now that's putting, you know, kind of a unique spin, uh, on the content.

So harrows great for that also, you know, and we're also in the personal finance niche. So we use wealth, tender wealth tender has a service kind of like Harrow, uh, but it's just, uh, the sources are just CFPs and financial coaches and, you know, kind of credentialed people. So one thing, uh, with Harrow, if you've ever used it for a source, you tend to get bombarded with responses cuz everyone's using it for link building.

Right? So you'll, you know, you'll put out a request that says, Hey, we're looking for the best, you know, books to read this winner. And a plumber will have, you know, quote for you and, and you know, that's maybe, you know, not the kind of expert, you know, necessarily you want in that post. Maybe you want them on, on a post about how to save money on, you know, plumbing, repairs.

I don't know. So, you know, the nice thing is with, um, with wealth tender, if you're looking for like CFPs, you know, you can get to those a lot faster. And we found just by going back and putting in like expert quotes from CFPs credentialed professionals, if we're talking about something that's maybe health related, putting in a quote from a physician or a doctor or somebody that's, you know, credentialed definitely improves the rankings of those posts.

I 

Jared: love some of the idea. Well, first of I love how your reverse engineering hero, everyone's talking about how hero is very saturated from a link building perspective. And you kind of flip the model on its head and say, well, if it's very saturated in the, on the link building side of things, maybe I'll just, uh, I'll benefit from all the different feedback that comes through.

Hero. Talk a bit more about Google trends. I'm curious to hear how, like, maybe give a, an example of how you would use Google trends. You talked about that SUV example, but what would, what would that look like? I love, I love that, that, um, I love that idea. So we've used Google 

Mike: trends to, uh, find unique data.

So what we found in particularly, uh, with editorial kind of partners, that they love, uh, Google, uh, they love data. So if you can come up with a data set to kind of support whatever your kind of claim is, or even just unique data set, they'll feature it. So you can go into like Google trends. And for example, uh, maybe, um, well, we ran this one when El Elon Musk was buying Twitter and we found that searches for Elon Musk for president increased like 900% after he was announced, uh, you know, he announced he was gonna buy, he was gonna buy Twitter.

And so we were able to turn that into an article and because it had unique data in it, a lot of people linked to it and featured it and talked about it. So Google trends can really be kind of great for figuring out, um, You know, just what everybody's kind of talk talking about. You can use it for topic ideas, or also just to generate unique content and data that you can add into your article.

Jared: Great. That's great. That's um, and, and, you know, I think that dovetails nicely into, um, something we haven't talked about yet. Where do, where do you think links, uh, play a role in core updates and specifically core update recovery? Was that at all a part of your, your strategy for recovery? Yeah, 

Mike: absolutely.

I think links are extremely important. Uh, I think that everyone kind of, uh, discounts the value of links. I think there's this perception out there that if you just write good enough content that, uh, you don't have to engage in any type of link building. But I think at the end of the day, I still think that Google puts a lot of weight on the links that the website has.

Particularly high quality links. So, you know, obviously we're not talking about going to black hat forearms and buying a bunch of web 2.0 links, but we're talking about, uh, high quality links and not just, you know, high quality like guest post links. And, you know, I think those things are kind of good, but also I think it's really good to try to get branded links.

I think that Google really wants to see that a website is more than just a website. And I think that they wanna see that a website is a trusted authoritative brand in their space. Right. That's the whole reason we buy, we build niche sites, right. Is so we can establish to Google that we're authoritative in that niche.

Right. So if your niche is, you know, all about raising small dogs or all about raising, you know, uh, chickens in the backyard, Right. And you're authoritative on that. Google's going to want, expect to see that like people link to your site, you know, as a, as a branded expert in that specific niche. So I think it's really important to try to get like media links and media features linking to your site.

Even if some of those are NOFO, you know, I know that like, as bloggers, you know, website owners, we only have so much time. So we like to go after, you know, the things that we think are gonna have the most amount of impact. So we all wanna focus on the, you know, do follow links and we don't wanna worry about the NOFO links, but I think, you know, if you can get even a nofollow link from a high authoritative, you know, brand website that links to your site as being authoritative on a topic, I think that that's really valuable.

And so we are very. Aggressive in our link building. If, if, if you will, um, in that we are constantly out trying to build relationships with journalists and editorial partners and media websites and get them, you know, talking about us and our brand and really kind of focusing on building, you know, authority in the space.

Jared: And so was that something that you with this May, 2020 update, did you, were you already building a lot of links and then you doubled down on that or did you change the way that you were building them at that point in, in terms of your recovery, uh, plan. Uh, I, I, 

Mike: I don't think that we changed the way we did that, but we definitely, um, used it as a kick in the butt to get more proactive.

Okay. You know, proactive about that. Um, for, for sure. And particularly getting higher quality editorial links was really important, really important to us. So we started, you know, we went back to, I think last time I told you that I was here, that we kind of backed away from horror a little bit, but then we went back to the basics and started doing horrors.

Uh, again, um, the other thing is we kind of started thinking a little bit more, uh, on that update. Uh, we started thinking a little bit more about just the branding O of the site and our own kind of online reputation management and, you know, the authority. And we kind of, you know, thought about, well, if we Google our name, what kind of, what, you know, what shows up.

So at the time it was your money geek and it was like, well, does it. Does your money geek show up, and then if your money geek shows up in this first spot, you know, that's great. But then also what other things kind of rank for it is our social media profiles ranking. Uh, and what we found was, you know, there was, you know, we're active on Twitter, so our Twitter page kind of ranked, but, you know, I didn't have a LinkedIn brand page at that point.

And I went back and I really kinda looked at it and said like, well, you know, LinkedIn does index the, you know, or Google, I should say, does index LinkedIn brand pages and Google uses LinkedIn brand pages to help construct knowledge panels. So it would be, it was a wasted opportunity to not be on, you know, LinkedIn.

And then what we found was we could, you know, establish our LinkedIn brand page. And then we have a, a plugin revival post, which we love. And, uh, we were able to use that plugin to share our blog post to our LinkedIn brand page. So, you know, now I just looked at it as an opportunity, you know, uh, LinkedIn, uh, Google's indexing our LinkedIn brand page.

We're, you know, sharing our blog posts to LinkedIn. And now those blog posts are showing, are showing in Google and we went and we got, uh, you know, we'd set up a Google, my business profile. I know it was kind of, you know, local, but same thing to Google. My business profile does share to, you know, we can share a blog post to that profile.

It's a Google product. So, you know, Hey, what better way to get Google to kind of. Show up and check out your site by getting on all these social media platforms that we're kind of ignoring a little bit. Um, you know, we just kind of went back and revisited 'em. So we went back and we established and got more followers, uh, on LinkedIn Facebook.

Um, we didn't focus too much on Instagram because, you know, if you Google a brand, you know, Instagrams, you know, tend not to get indexed, but you know, the Facebook page, LinkedIn brand page does, we went and we did a listing with, uh, I think it's startup ranking their startup ranker, where they can go and they list your website and all these different, uh, you know, uh, brand directories and website startup directories.

And so we really kind of went back to some of the basics of branding and to try to establish ourselves as being more authoritative in the eyes, the eyes of Google. And in doing that, we also kind of separated. How, you know, I think sometimes when we, when I started to blog, I kind of commingled, they had the, you know, my social media accounts and then had, you know, the website, social media accounts, mm-hmm and I kind of separated them out and tried to work on the branding to establish my own personal social media accounts as being the social media accounts of a, of a writer slash journalist, and then the social media accounts of the brand being separate and different and building up both of those as being, you know, authoritative.

And the result is, you know, now today for my, myself as a writer, I have a Google knowledge panel. And I think that that's really valuable because if Google's producing a Google knowledge panel about you, you know, it's, it's almost a little bit of a vote of confidence that Google's saying like, Hey, we recognize you.

You know, we know. That you're a writer and that you're established, you know, in that space and that's gonna help build that credibility cuz that's really what Google's kind of looking for. They wanna make sure, you know, can they trust the website? Can they trust the writer? Can they trust? Can they trust the content?

So I even went through and I spent, uh, after that Google, uh, update, I spent about a year writing, uh, freelancing. I didn't necessarily need the money, but I spent about a year freelancing for a career website, you know, cuz it was, you know, much, much bigger than mine. And I just wanted to establish a little bit of authority, you know, kind of in that space in credibility.

And I think that's absolutely been helpful in recovering. Whew 

Jared: lot there. , let's talk about the site and we've, you know, you talked about the process for, you know, a lot of de in a lot of detail, what was the timeline of the recovery? And I'll just kind of reshare some of the things that you mentioned at the outset.

So May, 2020 was the update. So two plus years ago dropped, I think you said 40, 40, or 45% overnight, which, you know, that's what core updates can do. Um, you know, 45 minutes later, you, you've gone on to tell us everything that you were, you put into place. Um, and how quickly did you start rolling out these updates?

How long did the updates take? What did the recovery process look like? How long did recovery. So it took 

Mike: just to pass core web vitals. I mean, it took me about 30 days because we, I mean, I talked to different, different experts. I talked to, you know, all kinds of different people out there. You name them. I talked to 'em.

I was, you know, uh, tried a couple different things. Uh, so probably took me about 30 days just to get the, the, that kind of improved. And then, uh, you know, there was, uh, a little bit of time, you know, going through and updating the content, but we started seeing positive results, uh, right around September, uh, September, October of, of that year, we started seeing positive, you know, positive movements.

I mean, there was some, you know, you know, You know, dips and bumps and, you know, pie kind of popups and everything with the traffic. But, you know, May's may is a pretty lousy time for Google to release these updates because, um, you know, we go into summer and summer traffic tends at least in the personal finance space.

Once you go into summer, I mean, traffic tends to decline, right? Because everyone's out doing things and you know, like every year, you know, July is always my worst month of the year, usually. Right. You know, because everyone's out doing 4th of July stuff, you know, nobody wants to talk about investing or side hustles during 4th of July week.

They want to go on vacation and that's fine. Right. So, you know, go, you know, a may update, it takes a couple weeks to roll out. You know, now it starts getting into June, July, and that's like a lousy time to kind of diagnose anything because you know, how much of it's the update and how much of it is, you know, seasonality or something summer.

Yeah. So it, you know, really wasn't until the fall where we could start seeing the traffic started. You know, growing, you know, you know, back up and, you know, and since then we've been able to grow since then, you know, we've had a couple little, you know, you know, bumps along the way. Uh, but the nice thing is like whenever we've had a, a down moment in traffic, we've always, uh, committed as, as, and as, as painful as it is.

Sometimes we always committed to keeping our foot on the gas. Yeah. So if a, if a post loses rankings, um, a lot of times people will kind of give up on it where if I have a post that loses some of its rankings I'm going in and trying to update it, share it to social media more, you know, share it in blog, shared groups, get more promotion, get more, you know, links back to that article and just keep, you know, keep that foot on that gas because you don't wanna send.

You know, a, a negative feedback loop to Google, right? Google drops your article, a couple of points, and then you just give up on it. Now Google's gonna sit there and think, well, maybe we were a right to drop this. Right. You know, we dropped it three points. It's not getting any more links. People aren't sharing it anymore.

Let's put it on page 90. So it's really important to just kind of, you know, stay at it. 

Jared: There's a widely held, uh, theory. And I say widely held cuz it's, you know, it, there's certainly a lot of data behind it. But, um, basically the idea that is that when, when you get hit broadly, metaphorically speaking broadly by a core update, it typically takes another core update to see substative changes.

And now again, small improvements, small declines, these things happen, uh, algorithmic play, seasonality, all that plays into it. But in your experience was your maybe did you have a big recovery moment and was that tied to another core update down the road? 

Mike: You know, I, I apologize that I don't exactly remember.

I think that there was right around that time. I think that there was a norm, you know, another update, I think Google does about two updates updates a year. I know that was right around the time. There was a lot of chatter about Google. Uh, Google was gonna make, uh, page speed, more of a ranking factor. And then they, you know, they gave everybody a little more time, you know, with that.

So, you know, right around all that discussion is when things started kind of improving. 

Jared: Yeah. That they, Ty typically always release one right around the holiday season, whether it's early November, late November, early December. So, um, I don't remember the exact, uh, date of all the updates though. I probably should have had a schedule booted up this for this interview, but yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I think that that's something that maybe a lot of people should, should, should hear it. I don't think it's a can rule. Um, but don't be surprised if you do get some crickets along the way of a recovery update, meaning you. Uh, oftentimes when you go and you update a post on your website, you'll see changes fairly quickly because of the changes you made.

But if you're updating content as a result of a broad core update, you might not see substantial results until another broad core update. And you might, but certainly there's some data out there that would suggest that that happens sometimes. So, and, and I 

Mike: think you're, you know, and I've seen this with working with some other bloggers and even some of the other sites they have.

So the, the more, the more established you are, then, you know, the, the, the faster your site will see results. Mm-hmm, , you know, positive results when you do positive things, right? If your site's, if your site's newer, you know, it could potentially take a, a little more time. And I, and I think that just really speaks to what Google is going after.

And really Google's concern I think is, is really about trust and authority. And I don't mean like domain authority, like a calculation, but I mean, like, they really just want to make sure that they're serving, you know, a, a good experience, you know, imagine if you, you know, let's say that you have your best friend and, and your best friend, uh, needs a plumber.

Are you gonna recommend, you know, your best friend goes, you know, to a plumber that you've never heard of before, you know, you know, maybe cuz he is gonna give you a $20 kickback, you're gonna sit there and go, well, you know, I don't know that plumber that, well, I don't know if I can trust him and I'm not gonna ruin my relationship with my best friend over it.

Right. Well like Google has these customers, it's people searching things in Google. Right. And you know, Google wants to make sure that if they're sending you to a, you know, a website that, you know, it's gonna some fly by night company or it's not gonna harm them or it's not gonna. You know, damage them.

And if we look at all along, like a lot of what Google does is all about throttling, you know, websites, you know, that are kind of new and aren't established and maybe aren't credible in the eyes of Google yet. Right. We know like the first six months of websites up, it has trouble kind of ranking for things because Google's like testing it out.

Right. We know that Google's like starting to do like put a little more emphasis on like who's behind the content, you know, who's actually writing, you know, writing the post who's, um, you know, is the, is the website authoritative, um, you know, so it's really important that you just establish that trust with Google and the more you do the establish that trust, then the faster you're typically going to, you know, improve and recover from updates.

Jared: So. Final question from me. Where was the site at, in terms of, you know, maybe page views per month, uh, prior to that update back in may 20, 20, where did it dip to, and then maybe where's it at now couple years later, a and again, emblematic for those of you who have been hit by an update, because I already know that the site is doing very well.

And so it, it, hopefully these numbers will really inspire people who are now an hour into this interview, dealing with a site that dropped, but can have some encouragement that even though it might be a long road to recovery, um, tease people with what, with what, what, what can happen, you know, and the good that can come from it.

Mike: Yeah. So prior to the update, we're averaging about. 2 5250 K page views a a month or so. Um, and we had, we had envisioned that we were on our way to 500 K. That was, that was the goal that we had set for ourselves for our anniversary was to hit 500 K in may, cuz it sounds cool. And um, that was, that was the goal.

And by the end of the end of may, I was down to like 1 65, 1 67 or, or so, so we went from two 50 to, you know, just, just a little better than, than half. And then we kind of struggled along in that kind of bouncing around and you know, the 1 61 70, 180, you know, right along until, uh, you know, September or so.

Um, then things started going back up and then we started, uh, by the, uh, end of the year, we were back to about two 50 or so. And then, um, going into the next year, we started growing off of the two 50 and we're, you know, uh, Somewhere between two 50 and 500 for the beginning part of the, the following year.

And then, uh, just kind of kept growing from that, just working the basics, you know, and over, over and over again, until we got the site to, uh, 1.5 million page views in January of this year, then we did our rebrand. So we went from, we went from being, uh, your money geek to being wealthy geeks in that did, uh, that was really scary.

And, you know, everyone kind of warned us like, you know, this is, you know, you know, your traffic's gonna dip, you know, our ad thrive where with ad thrive, ad thrive, warned us. Like your traffic's going to dip a little bit. Your revenue, your RPMs are gonna dip a little bit because now everybody's gotta like reestablish the relationship and everything, uh, with you, uh, with this new kind of new kind of site.

And so I just kind of treated that like an update as well. And I just said, okay, well I know, you know, this is gonna hurt. I expected it to hurt. I had saved up a little bit of money. I had knew ahead of time that this was gonna happen. So I had saved up a little bit of, uh, you know, money to kind of, you know, keep the foot on the gas and keep updating and putting out content and everything we dip down to about 800,000 page views right after the, uh, URL change.

And you know, now today we're back to 1.5, 

Jared: 1.5 million. That is no small feat. Congratulations. Well done. Uh, thank you. Um, yeah, the website is, uh, wealth geeks.com uh, working people follow along with what you're doing. I mean, I, I I'll have to say it again. Make sure you go back. If you haven't watched the initial interview, we did.

Um, I don't know, I'm guessing maybe six months ago, roughly, maybe nine months ago, something like that. So it's, it's not, it's very fresh and very new. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. So people can follow along with that, but where else can people, um, keep up with what you're doing? 

Mike: Well, first check out the site, you know, cuz we had all kind, all kinds of awesome information about personal finance and entertainment and, and geeky, you know, stuff.

So please check out the site, uh, and help support us there. But also we run a blogging mastermind group. Uh, I talked about that a little bit. Last time I was here and we teach other people, you know, how to grow their, their websites. And uh, you know, the group I think is kind of, you know, unique. I'll put on my sales hat for a, a second, but uh, our group is really unique in that.

Um, you know, we, we, we don't just teach people how to blog and help them blog, but we actually provide the tools and resources. To actually blog. So we crowdsource resources and everything. So all the SEO tools, everything that we use on the site, everything that we test out, we just give, we're almost kind of franchising blogging, if you will, and making it so everything that we're kind of doing to operate our sites, you know, bloggers can do on their own.

Jared: And, uh, let's see what, uh, we, you, I think we included a link last time to that as well. We'll, we'll include a link in the show notes for that mastermind. Yes, people can follow on that. You're listen. Um, Michael, another great interview. Thank you so much. I think there's so much, you know, in conclusion there's just, it's so difficult when you've been hit by an update to look at all the, um, the, you know, the declining numbers, perhaps declining revenue, uh, declining traffic and, and really separate the emotions of that.

Come up with a plan on what to do to recover. There's a lot of things you can do. This is a great plan of attack that people can, can go about doing so. Thanks for sharing all these great insights and again, very welcome. Everybody has great success story to look at. Thank you. All right. Well until next time.

Mike: Thanks so much. Awesome. All right. Well hopefully, hopefully you could. I had so much stuff that I wanted to say. And then, then I wasn't sure if I was touching on all the points. So we had to outline, and I don't know if the 

Related Posts

Are Google AI Results (SGE) Going Away? Getting Traffic from Facebook + 2 Weird Niche Sites

I Make $10k to $30k Per Month Working Part Time On My Sweet Food Blog

Is Google Really Getting Worse? + Weird Niche Sites About Arcade Sticks and Emojis

Valuable Lessons Amy Aitman Learned From Managing 150+ Niche Websites

How Google Shapes the Internet + Google Debunks Ranking Factors and 2 Weird Niche Sites