How Google Is Killing My Business, But I'm Not Dead

One spring day in 2012, I was walking around the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market and stopped to talk with one of the owners of an orchard that I had helped out during the 2011 season. I helped pick apples a few times a week and worked their table at the farmer's market on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I also helped lead school tours of the orchard.

The news I got on the sunny May was anything but sunny. The late winter that season was way hotter than normal. The temperatures in March were actually warmer than they were in April. So the trees started blooming way earlier than normal. Then cold temperatures come back and destroyed those blossoms.

She had nothing left. No apples. No peaches. No plums. No pears. No cherries. Sure they have had bad crops in the past, but never nothing at all. You couldn't have predicted a year in which they would have no fruit from their trees.

This blog, my family business that supports me, my wife, and 4 kids have experienced our own 2012. I started the blog in 2009 and built it up to be a near 6-figure business that fully support my family, way more than any other job I or my wife has had. 2023 was a slow year to start but heading into September 2023, my blog was on an upswing again. Traffic was rising, which means rising ad revenue for me. I make my income mainly from the ad revenue you see on this site just as a newspaper or magazine makes most of their income from the ads in their pages. At the rate I was going it looked like I was in for a very profitable 4th quarter, which is where I am make the most money with Thanksgiving and Christmas as many businesses do.

Then September 19 came and I saw a drop off in traffic that didn't seem to make sense. My hopes for one day fluke were crushed when the rest of the month looked the same. I was now getting more than a 1,000 less visitors per day.

Then October 10 came and I saw my stats drop yet again with another 1,000 or so less visitors per day. Now at this point I had lost around 50% of my traffic and with 50% of my future income.

That was all part of a change in the algorithm Google uses. They did an update called the Helpful Content update and for reasons I still don't understand they basically showed that they didn't think my content was worth the rankings I was getting before for many years. My blog posts moved further down the rankings behind pages like Reddit for example, so less people began seeing them and clicking onto my blog.

I have endured a lot of Google updates in the past. Some helped, some hurt, and some I stayed the same. Everyone that hurt me, I bounced back from eventually. Never was one that hurt me this badly. I was hearing the same thing from so many other bloggers, they had suddenly lost 50% or more of their traffic and income that they rely on to support their families. In some cases it's people that have health issues where they need a job like this.

Recovering from these updates is never a quick thing. It happened right before Thanksgiving and Christmas. This did not gave me not enough time to make adjustments if I could even figure out what to adjust. So my earnings from the holidays was far below what they have been for many years.

This pattern has continue into 2024 with no end in sight. So far I have not come across a single person that has recovered. Not one. Everyone else I have talked to is saying the same thing, they haven't heard of anyone recovering. Google has changed the way they show results with a focus on big sites like Reddit, Quora, Forbes, at the expense of independent content creators like me.

Imagine you working a 40-hour a week job and doing very well, and then your hours are cut down to 10 hours a week and you are still doing the same amount of work just not getting paid for the other 30 hours anymore. This is what this is like for me.

Right now I am working on many different ways to increase traffic to my site that does not involve Google, each one is very promising and I am following the advice of those that have already done it. All those things are going to take time to work out but I am confident that in time they will work out and this business will thrive again.

When that orchard I worked for lost their fruit in 2012, they had to come up with ways to keep their business afloat until the next season. They did have some crop insurance but it wasn't enough to cover all their expenses. They had to transition to selling other things, like planting more pumpkins, growing decorative corn, trying to increase donut sales, coming up with different entertainment ideas to bring people out to the orchard still when they didn't have any apples to pick. I know it was hard but they made it through and are still growing fruit to this day.

They called on their customers to come out and support them and buy what they had to sell still. They are still around so they made it through it, just like we are going to make it through too.

How You Can Help Right Now

Updated on July 9th, 2024

As they did, I am calling on any friend, family, or fan of this blog to help us out. There are many ways you can do that. As many of you know we have been traveling in our camper since September 2020. We recently spend 9 ½ months at an AirBNB in Utah. That has come to an end. We are currently making our way to the Portland area to be near family as I work on recovering the business.

It's going to be a few months still before I will start seeing any increases in income as this is the slow season for bloggers and the things I have been working on to increase traffic to the blog take time. In the mean time things are tight for buying food, paying for gas, and if we need any addition campgrounds to go to as we wait for my mother in law (she sold her house in California and is in the process of moving) to buy a house in that area that we will park our camper at once she buys it. My wife, Donna, is going to fly down to California this month to help her finish moving, so there will be some time where it will mainly be just me and the kids, so I will have to cut back some on my time to work during that period.

Here are some ways you can help.

I have these Substack pages where you can become a subscriber to for premium content. These are ad free pages that depends on a subscription model instead of an ad model. The cost is $5 a month or $50 for a full year.

Master Your Meal Plan (tips on how to plan meals, plus a podcast about how I cook in the camper)
Costnivore (how to shop and cook meat that you get from Costco, includes podcast)
What Apple to Eat Today (tips on what are the best apple to be eating right now, shopping guide for different grocery stores, stories from orchards I have visited)

I have a few companies that I work with as an affiliate where if you buy any of their products I receive a commission. I need to hit a minimum of $50 before payments are released and I am about $5 away from that as of writing this, so if any of these types of products interest you, use my links below.

I also an affiliate for ThermoWorks products you can read more about them in these posts:

And you can find some links for buying my favorite salt, Redmond Real Salt here.

Or you can just "buy me a bag of apples" through the Buy Me a Cup of Coffee site. This is just meant to support my overall work. I might actually buy a bag of apples with that money or some other fruit!

If you can't support any of these things, there are also ways to lend a hand without spending money.

Free ways to help include:

Sharing any of my content from this blog, whether that is on social media (like Facebook and Instagram).
You can subscribe to the free version of the Substacks above and help out by sharing, liking and commenting on that content.
Be sure you are following me on Instagram too, so you can like and share my content. I am working with different food companies on some of the videos I post. I get paid more on some of those when I more people like, comment, and share those videos. Thank you so much to those that have been sharing, liking, and commenting on those videos, it's really helped. Keep it up!!!
Listen to episodes of my podcast, Eat Shop Waste Not
Follow me on Flipboard
You can share this very page as well. Share our story. Let people know what's going on because it's just not us but many content creators like myself are hurting and are working their butts off to find a new way and to shift their entire business models that for year upon year depended on Google to be the way they got traffic to their sites.

If you are interested in learning more about what Google is up to and another website that is struggling too, check out this article from Retro Dodo - Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites. They have done the best job of explaining this. Or you can also read this article posted by the CEO of the ad company that I use - Don’t Be Distracted By Cookie Drama. Google’s Search Changes Are The Real Existential Threat

Thanks everyone for your support. It means a lot to my family and I. I hope to write again down the road about how we came out good on the other side of this.