This week, Jared Bauman sits down with Morgan McBride, a previously successful content creator who was first highlighted as a Google Success Story and then crushed by its HCU.

She was invited to the Google Creator Summit, but her experience and interview contrast sharply with Jake Cain’s, who also attended the event.

Morgan holds nothing back as she talks about growing her portfolio of websites, getting hit by the update, and everything that did (and didn’t) happen at this special event for creators.

Watch the Full Episode

Morgan kicks things off talking about her blog, which she started in 2012 and is in the DIY/crafting/woodworking niche. She shares how, after several years of hard work, it took off and how she eventually spun off her content into multiple sites. Currently, she has a portfolio of 4 sites.

Unfortunately, like so many people, the 2023 Helpful Content Update impacted her site, Charleston Crafted, and since September she’s seen a steady decline in traffic, essentially to zero.

She talks about her non-SEO approach to ranking and reveals that her portfolio was earning mid-6 figures last year. She also talks about her traffic numbers. 

Then they dive into the Creator Summit.

She shares her initial impressions when she was invited to the event and when she arrived, and talks about Danny Sullivan’s initial presentation to the group and quotes him directly. 

Morgan talks about what concerned her when they spoke to multiple Google engineers, the disconnect she saw, and how she felt about Google’s comments when they broke into small groups.  

She shares the message she wanted to bring to the Summit and talks about whether she thinks the Google engineers understood that there were sitewide classifiers suppressing their sites.

She talks about what stood out about the creator presentations and shares her thoughts about the final presentation, which came from Pandu Nayak.

Morgan also talks about the personal impact of describing the update as targeting “helpful content,” her final conclusions from the summit, and what her plans are currently and moving forward.

Topics Morgan McBride Talks About

• How she got into blogging
• Creating her portfolio of sites
• Impact of the HCU
• Getting invited to the Summit
• First impressions of Google Campus
• Summit experience
• Impressions of Danny Sullivan
• Impressions of Google engineers
• Breaking into small groups
• Sitewide classifiers
• Creator presentations
• Pandu Nayak
• The impact of the term “helpful” 
• Final thoughts on the summit
• How she’s doing now
• Moving forward
• Advice for other creators

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. And today we are joined by Morgan McBride with charlestoncrafted. com. Morgan, welcome on board.

Morgan: Hey, Jared. Thank you so much for having me.

Jared: It’s great to have you. We’ve had some fun exchanges over email to, to kind of build up to today.

We’re talking about the Google web. Summit and we’ve had part one with Jake Kane. I’m going to call this part two with Morgan. Morgan, you were there as well. Um, and so I’ll say at the outset, if you missed the interview with Jake, we’ll include in the show notes, you can go back and watch that. We are talking about the same thing, but I will tell you from talking with Morgan back and forth, we never this, I think it’s going to be a very different perspective and what you took away from it will be very different.

We are going to go through it in depth though. Before we do, Can you give us some backstory? Tell us about yourself, who you are, your website or your portfolio, and kind of where you know where you are right now.

Morgan: Yeah, sure. Um, I’m Morgan. I have been blogging since 2012, so I blog in the DIY home decor, crafting woodworking niche.

And I started blogging just because I was passionate about it. I was reading other people’s blogs. I was doing crafts, and I thought this will be something fun to do. Um, ended up getting really into it. My husband started doing it with me. He was not handy at all when we started this. Now he’s a really good woodworker and very handy.

So it has been a lot of skill development and that way, as well as on the technical side, um, we did this for fun for a long time. I’ll never forget when I got my first sponsored post, um, someone offered us 100 to do a project about cat food, and I felt like. I had won the lottery. I was getting paid to do what I loved already and what was already fun.

I couldn’t believe it. I told everyone I knew I got paid a hundred bucks and everybody was so excited. Nobody could believe it. It was like free internet money. Uh, this was probably 2014. So this was just like you didn’t know anybody making money on the internet. At least I did not. Um, and so it was a It has been just a wild ride since then, we got to the point where we were putting out five blog posts a week and not just blog posts, like projects, crafts, actual, we do things and write about it.

Um, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of time and we had to be able to make more than a hundred dollars every other month. If we got a sponsored post, we went to a blogging conference, which if anybody is familiar with the DIY home decor niche is called Haven Conference. They still have it. It’s in Atlanta every year.

And that’s where we learned that you could really make some money off of this. Um, we met Mediavine. I had never heard of such a thing. I took an SEO class. I had never heard of such a thing. And next thing I knew we were making a few thousand dollars a month doing the same thing we were already doing. So that’s kind of my origin story.

Um, I quit my job in 2019. My husband quit his job in 2021. So we’re both full time. On our website. And, um, in 2020, I spun off some of our content. Because that was when everybody was telling you to niche down, niche down. Focus. The niches are in the riches. Uh, focus on one thing. And our site had a lot of things.

So I spun off my kids crafts. I spun off paint color content. And I spun off houseplant content into their own websites. So I have four websites now. They’re all on Mediavine. Um, and they were all doing really great. That was a really great strategy for me and for my audience because if you landed on a paint color post, then you got shown relevant other paint color posts and you got shown options for paint colors and my products for paint colors and not like a woodworking plan when that’s not necessarily a good fit.

Um, so it was great for us until it wasn’t, which was September 2023 helpful content update. My primary site was not hit at all, was not affected, but my three smaller spinoff sites went like 75 percent down in Google traffic overnight. Um, then starting in December, I still don’t know what happened mid December last year, but mid December, my main site, um, Charleston Crafted was hit.

It started this sort of ski slope down and in my 12 years of running it We had never been negatively hit by an update before so that started in December March was a huge drop and then there was another huge drop in august, I think and now everything is basically zero on google Um, so that’s really fun.

Luckily. I have uh content that’s really good on pinterest So pinterest is holding us up youtube other things like that and i’ll talk about that later But um, I was so excited to be invited to the summit because when that forum came out You The feedback form has been over two hours, filling it out with so many examples, put just like dumped my heart into how things just got ripped out.

Like we always did what Google told us to do. Another fun anecdote is that we were Google success story. I think you did, Jared, did you do the YouTube video where you showed. Google success stories.

Jared: Spencer did. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was in

Morgan: that, um, as one of the flops and we’ve been featured three times as Google success stories.

My husband went to Washington, DC with Google to talk to Congress people about the positive impacts that Google has on our local economy. 4th, This year, 2024, we had Google photographers in our home taking a photo shoot of us doing our kitchen renovation for their economic impact report. We were their example for the state of South Carolina.

You can look it up. We’re still in it, um, showing their wonderful impact on the local economy. And the next day, March 5th, is when Charleston Crafted was hit with that update, the March core update, and we lost 75 percent of our traffic and our revenue overnight. So, um, that was. Fun.

Jared: That, out of everything you said, just might be the soundbite that gets used in the introduction.

Yeah. The irony is, we talked, uh, with Jake about the irony just of having this while launching AI overviews to the world and the irony there, but I mean, what you just said is probably, that was the larger irony, right? Of having this web summit while launching AI over the world, the smaller, independent irony, the irony of the individual small publisher was, is exactly right there.

Encapsulated what you say, having you featured while getting completely slammed by their own, their very own algorithm. And

Morgan: they sent a photo, like it was a whole thing in our house. It wasn’t even just like an interview. It was a whole, they sent a photographer and it was a whole thing. And we actually reached out to our contact with the success.

Story program. And she said, Oh, that’s too bad. But my team doesn’t talk to the Google search team, so I can’t really do anything or help you with that. So that was just a sign early on that what we saw this summit that Google is so big and the teams do not talk to each other. So you can talk to one person and they really don’t know what the other teams are doing.

And they certainly can’t impact your search results.

Jared: So before we kind of get into the day as it unfolded or the event as it unfolded, I just, I thought I’d call out something that’s very different already about what, how we’re going to hear from you. Um, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you know, when we had Jake on, Jake came at his content, he came at his publishing from an SEO standpoint, right?

And so he had a background in search engine optimization. And again, that’s not to say necessarily that the content is better or worse as a result of it, just that he was pursuing Topics and content and something from, as he put it, like finding gaps, looking for underserved topics, looking for, uh, things that were the long tail from everything you just went through.

It sounds like SEO has always been an afterthought you’ve ranked well for very different reasons on Google. You’ve gotten a lot of Google traffic, but not really necessarily because of that SEO focus. Like, how would you say that has played in? And especially as it’s built up to this with Google for you.

Morgan: Right. So I do do some like SEO research, not anymore. I’ve given up, but I didn’t do some SEO research and did write some long tail content in more recent years, but for the first 10 years of our business did not. And that remains not the focus. You can go and look at our website and it’s like, I’m showing you a centerpiece that I made.

And, um, A side table that my husband built, and it is real things that we really do sometimes influenced by like trends or things we see going on, but not really based off search, um, research. It is just based off of our real life projects we’re doing that we want to share with others and teach them how to do

Jared: right.

Okay, well, I just think that’s good to kind of underscore as we go into this, you know, time is that people were there. With SEO focus and without SEO focus, people have been hit, obviously, with a focus on SEO and without a focus on SEO, it kind of hasn’t been, um, this entire topic hasn’t been, uh, focused specifically on a certain type of content creator, but maybe more the size or the type of content that the creator is creating.

Morgan: Yeah, I definitely consider myself I consider myself a blogger and not an SEO or I tell, I mean, I tell random people on the street that I own websites because if you tell people you’re a blogger, they think you’re posting about your breakfast or whatever. But, um, definitely don’t consider myself an SEO.

Yeah.

Jared: One more question where we get into it, just from a high level, whatever you’re comfortable sharing, whether it’s, you know, uh, traffic or revenue or something, just to give people an idea of where your brand was at before the helpful content update. I mean, it was supporting both you and your husband, so it had to have been doing pretty well.

You were a featured story for Google in terms of a success story, but where were things at from whatever way you can give us a framework so we can kind of understand going into your perspectives?

Morgan: Yeah. Last year we made like mid six figures. So I’ll say more than 300 less than 500, 000. Um, but we. Charles the Crafter had like 250, 000 page views, um, and the other sites had matched that together.

So that was a cool thing. And, um, a lot of our traffic was from Google, never more than half, which I think is what, why I’m still sitting here today. Uh, Google was about half of our traffic, but not more than that. And, um, our revenue is a lot of it is Mediavine, but we also do affiliates. We sell digital products that do pretty well.

Um, and we do sponsored work. So we do have a, what has saved us is that we have a variety of income sources and a variety of traffic sources, but we went, our income is down like 75 percent this year and our traffic, our Google traffic is down. 99 percent on my smaller sites and 96 percent on Charleston Crafted and, um, our traffic overall is down by about half on Charleston Crafted.

Jared: Okay. Okay. So doing very well and now doing very bad.

Morgan: I mean, not very bad. We’re still fine. We can live, but I have to like peel back on the Disney cruises and, um, you know, the generous donations to charity and all of my, um, So,

Jared: yeah, and I think we’ll talk a bit about kind of some of the adjustments that you’re making and that sort of thing.

Maybe as we start to get towards the tail end, um, let’s roll up our sleeves here. Let’s get into it. So, um, you know, let’s follow it maybe from a chronological timeline perspective. Like tell us about arriving. Tell us about the first time. I believe you guys went on a tour. I feel like I now was there even though I wasn’t there because I’ve, I’ve, I’ve.

Read the articles and talk to the people and stuff. But yeah, maybe first impressions arrival tour, these kinds of things. Like, let’s get into those things for you.

Morgan: So I have to start with the email inviting me to come from Danny Sullivan was so sketchy. It was like one line and a plain email. I had never interacted with him.

I deleted the email. I just thought it was. Somebody who’s going to try and sell me a backlink or something. So I deleted the email. He had to email me a second time and I felt very uncomfortable with the whole thing. Honestly, I live in South Carolina. He was trying to get us to go to, or he did get me to go to Mountain View, California, which is.

about as far away as you can get, um, for a day. I felt very uncomfortable, I guess as a female, like, flying across the country because some guy from Twitter sent you a plane ticket. I don’t know, if I told my mother I was doing it, it would have been very sketchy. So it was kind of a weird opening. We were able to connect, luckily, on Twitter with other people who were going to be there, and that made me feel much more comfortable, but Google didn’t do any of that.

That was all something that we did ourselves. So I flew out there, and the day we got in, we had a opportunity to take a tour with Danny Sullivan on the Google campus. And I have a very different perspective of the tour than Jake did. That’s why I wanted to bring it up. I’ve been to some cool places before.

I used to work in hospital billing, and I went to this software company called Epic. They have a headquarters in Wisconsin. They are, that is some cool campus. They have a building that looks like a Harry Potter castle and they have a deep space building that you go in. So I had expectations that Google was going to be really cool.

This was just an office building. It was not, I mean, it had glass walls, and it had a ping pong table, and a snack bar, but it was just a regular office building, and the weirdest part was it was empty. There was no one there. There was nobody working at all, and it was really creepy. So we’d float across the country to see this guy.

I thought we were gonna see something really cool and he took us to an empty office building and walked around and he felt very uncomfortable. We all didn’t know each other. It was such a weird vibe. It really set the tone for the, I want to, I keep wanting to call it a weekend. It wasn’t a weekend, it was a Tuesday, but it set the tone for like this really weird eerie vibe that others have described as a funeral.

Um, I don’t know, he took us out to walk past, I know Jake commented about the sand volleyball pit, and to me it was like covered with leaves and looked abandoned. Like, I don’t know, it was such unexpected place. I thought it was going to be totally different. Um, so that’s to set the tone, we were in this really abandoned, plain old office building.

The next morning we got up and we had a full day of This summit and we went over to a different office building and, um, we started off with Danny giving us a speech, a presentation that I thought was super inappropriate for the group because it was who he gives to companies, kind of convincing them to do SEO and to do search, which I guess it was just a slide deck.

He had on his computer. It felt very like a misfit for the audience. Um, but I wrote down some things that he did say. He opened it up and made sure to say the people in this group were far more impacted than we would have liked. By this Google update, this was not our intent. We really are trying to make search better, but it is an imperfect system.

You have good content. You are great creators. We want to get better at recognizing and rewarding this content. So those are direct quotes. That’s exactly what he told us. And he said, I know it’s hard to believe, but we really do want to highlight real human voices that came up when we were talking about AI a little bit, but Danny was very apologetic the whole time.

He was making a lot of self deprecating jokes and it was weird. It was just a really weird vibe, like, I don’t know, I’ve been to Google events before and they shower you with swag and they have these big meals and all this and it was like they were trying to not make it feel that way, but almost to the point that it felt just very uncomfortable.

Jared: How would, I’m curious, like, what approach would have been better for you? Given all that you’ve been through, given that in many ways you’re one of 20 representing thousands of online publishers that have been in the same position as you, like, what do you think, and again, we’ll get into it, but given that really it’s no news, you know, like there’s no tactical news to walk away with, it’s not like they were announcing that the algorithm had been fixed and at the end there were streamers and a party and you’re ranking again and they kind of do a big reveal, right?

Like that would’ve been perfect, but given that a lot of this didn’t have any tactical news, like what approach would’ve kind of Made you a little bit more comfortable, a little bit happier, a little bit more, um, um, kind of, what’s the word I’m using, engrossed in what they were trying to get across?

Morgan: Yeah, that is a good point, um, I think they were in a hard situation to make me happy, I went into it kind of with a bad attitude, um, but I think, That if Danny’s Danny was very apologetic and he recognized our That we were real content creators that we really created good content and that there were flaws in the search Nobody else did that for the rest of the day So I think having the rest of the team on the same page would have helped.

I think that Um, some of the people that they brought in, the Googlers that we spoke to, seemed like they really didn’t know anything about Google. It was shocking what we had to teach them. And then the man that they brought in at the end, who is, his name is Pandu Nayak, I believe. He was the head of search.

They didn’t actually introduce him. They just brought him in like he was Oprah. We should all know who he was. Um, he, He was the worst, period, but he was very much, like, denying that there was a problem. So I think if they had gotten everybody on their team on the same page, that would have helped. And, um, I don’t know, it was just bleak.

It was just a bleak group, it was a bleak situation, I don’t know that there was any saving it. Honestly, Jared , it,

Jared: it does sound like you’re echoing a lot of what I’ve heard from others, including Jake. Like Danny struck a very different tone than he has in the past, and Danny struck a very different tone in comparison to many of the others from Google that were there.

Um, and you know, historically speaking, Danny has come from this community, right? started off as someone who’s online, you know, small publisher, that sort of thing. But I think there’s this growing sentiment that even maybe Danny doesn’t know what the heck’s going on over there. Like, did, is that kind of echoing how you felt or was it more that he was, um, trying to, uh, get across Google stance to you and he was in the know on all that.

Morgan: No, so it became very clear, very quickly to me that they don’t know how their algorithm works and they don’t know why we’re getting kicked out. That was being, that was repeated to us. Like, we don’t know your, we know your content is good when we as humans look at it. Um, you know, we’ve been told, we’ve been told by the Google success team that our content is good when humans are picking it.

Um, other people in there have been told by Danny. He, Read every one of our websites and said, all of this is good content. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be appearing in search. Um, so that was hard to hear. Almost. It’s almost like I would have rather them said, well, your content is bad because you’re doing X, Y and Z, but to hear your content is good.

And then after that original presentation, they brought out trying to find her name. Um, Elizabeth Turner, I believe was her last name. Definitely Elizabeth. And she, poor thing, got up there. She was very sweet, uh, very nice, but she got up there, and she said, we have some big do’s and don’ts for you guys. And this is what crushed me.

Let’s see if I can read it for you. Do focus on creating good content. Imagine someone arriving for the first time on your website. Would they recognize your expertise? If you do that, we will reward you at Google. And it was just like a slap in the face. I was the first one to raise my hand, interrupt her poor planned speech, and tell her, That is the worst thing you could say to us right now.

Like, you’re looking at a room full of people who’ve been told our content is good. I know my content is good. It’s always been rewarded as good. My readers tell me it’s good. Google specifically has told me it’s good. And you’re telling me, just make good content. It really showed they have a disconnect between The actual humans and what the algorithm is doing,

Jared: right?

Right. And that’s, um, I mean, I guess that was probably Elizabeth Tucker. Uh, Tucker. Tucker. Yes. Yeah. No, it’s fine. I’m just, I was like, is it Tucker? Is it Turner? We featured her on the news podcast a couple of times. I think she’s, she

Morgan: was so nice. Right.

Jared: Well, it,

Morgan: it struck a bad chord. . Yeah.

Jared: Yeah. Jake had a comment like, nice.

Doesn’t, uh, nice. Doesn’t pay the bills. .

Morgan: Yes. Yes. That is true. Yeah. Yeah.

Jared: Um, well, uh, I know Jake had commented on some of the individual sessions with Google engineers and he had some interesting things to say about that. Um, that were different from the conversations with Danny. What was your experience?

What group did you get put in? What was your experience when it comes to kind of the breakout sessions with the Google engineers?

Morgan: Yeah. So I was in the same group as Jake. Actually, we were put in the other group, which is interesting

Jared: because it’s two very different things.

Morgan: Yeah. DIY home decor. There was another home decor girl with us.

There was a wedding guy. Yeah. And there was Jake who’s just like got a bunch of random bird watching and baseball watching and like all the sort of lifestyle They should have called it lifestyle There was a group that was entertainment that was about half and half video game people and like celebrity gossip kind of people Then there was a travel group, which was very heated And then there was reviews, which it was snowboard reviewers and shoe reviewers and those kind of things.

Um, but our group was people who don’t do reviews, um, share a lot of, I guess, tutorials or roundups or advice for hobbies. And it was very interesting. We were paired with Google employees from New York. So they had actually flown in from New York City. And so they were there just for this event, which was nice.

Um, that was better than some of the people who had been there earlier I was talking to and found out they were like interns that had been working there a month. And they were very nice. As you said, nice just to pay the bills. They didn’t really know very much about anything. These people who were in the small group at least knew more about search.

But they really wanted to go off on different tangents about setting up, uh, a profile or getting you verified or, you know, things that were not really the reason we were there. It was like they were trying to come up with all these things they could add to Google search. And it’s like, we really just want our traffic back.

We just want this classifier lifted. Everybody who’s there. Has been suppressed. And so it doesn’t, it was frustrating for us. And I know Jake was giving the refrain over and over again. It doesn’t matter if you add all these things, if we’re still pulled out of search, you know, if we’re still not available, um, to readers.

So it was fine, but it was very frustrating. They really want to talk about search console a lot where they could add to search console. I personally like search console. I think it’s pretty good. I had a whole page. Of critique on GA4 I wanted to provide and they just blew me off immediately. And so we don’t do Google analytics that has nothing to do with us.

No, which is fine. Different teams, but they just, they didn’t really want my feedback there.

Jared: You talked about it. So maybe I’ll go there. Like, uh, Jake kind of talked about how his whole thing he wanted, he wanted to harp on, he had prepared in his mind was this whole classifier thing. And, you know, he was clear, like everyone kind of agreed on that.

So it’s not like. Something that he thought of and, you know, he, but like, what was your thing going into it? Like, did you have something you were trying to get across centrally or was maybe on the flip side? Was it more like, Hey, you asked me here. I’m just going to free form. I’m going to vent. I’m going to let you know how impactful this has been to me.

It’s not my idea to come up with solutions for you, your job to come up with solutions. I just need you to understand how impactful this has been on both an emotional level, a financial level, you know, a blogging level, etc.

Morgan: Yeah, so I actually asked that question to Danny when we did the tour on the first day.

I said, we get three minutes to speak, and what would be the best use of my three minutes? Because I have a lot of things I could say. Should I get up there and cry about how we had to withdraw my son from his school because we could no longer pay the tuition? Or should I, like, what should I talk about?

And he said, focus on. That you are a real expert and how you are creating real content. You’re not a robot, you’re not pumping out AI. Because I really think a lot of these Google employees had a vision of what we were. That we were just cranking out these content machines and not creating everything with care.

I mean, these travel bloggers go around the world and go places and take real photos and eat at the restaurants before they recommend them and seeing that we had real experience. So my main goal going into it was to be a voice for so many. I figured it’s so rare to get a seat at the table. When I get a seat at the table, I’m going to speak up and represent.

I posted in the Mediavine Facebook group before I left and asked for people’s stories to share. And I just was trying to really put a human face. Behind what they have done because I think that these employees did not realize and it was very I don’t want to say fun because it’s a little like i’m able to say this But I to look them in the eye and tell them how much you’ve been impacted made them very uncomfortable these were engineers who are not used to um, maybe face to face with people and so that was satisfying for me and um, That was my focus was that I share projects that I really do in my home and I’m being outranked by like wiki how and Reddit and all of these things.

So it was that was kind of my message.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I mean anything else from the uh, the time with the engineers, um, you know, jake had commented they were very engaged. Um, I think he also commented that I believe it was this session. There were people watching You From other parts of Google that weren’t there in present, but we’re listening.

Um,

Morgan: they video watched Three minutes they had people videotape and we each got to speak our three minutes Um, which was interesting seeing everybody’s take but this one there were a lot of people there We had maybe five google employees in our circle. They were taking a lot of notes It’s just like I told you I feel like they were going down the wrong the wrong trail They were really focused on things that, I mean, I guess it would be nice to have a Google profile if you looked at my website for it to have my picture and a little bio, you know, like if you look up an author, how it puts in Google, that would be nice, but that isn’t why I’m here.

I’m here because. My traffic disappeared overnight and my peers are still appearing in search. So I know it’s not they’re not showing small publishers It’s just certain people were suppressed

Jared: Let me ask you like a point blank question because I feel like I can get a true opinion out of you. So

Morgan: I

Jared: Get that sense here about 25 minutes in

Morgan: yeah.

Yeah

Jared: Do you think they understood? That there is a site wide classifier on HCU hit sites. Do you think engineers walked away with that clear understanding or do you think that they still think That and I’m not implying that I don’t know a Google engineer when it comes to search, but there certainly has been a strong impression that they have not felt like there’s a site wide classifier.

That was a central point. Everybody kept coming down on. Do you think the engineers walked away going, Hmm, I think there probably is.

Morgan: I hope that they, if they really listened and took it to heart, I hope that they went and investigated it. I have a feeling that engineers would not believe it out of my mouth.

They would have to see it for themselves. And that was something that. Uh, Danny was very, um, Insistent on that. They are doing a lot of um, testing. I’m trying to remember what they called it They called it debugging query debugging and that we could send examples of And kind of like we did with the original form um specific queries that were giving poor results That they can debug because I used to work in a little bit of coding and this is what I asked him This is what made me think they don’t know what’s going on with the algorithm.

I said when you get results I used to work in coding at a hospital and let’s say we ran a query to find all the men who went to cardiology in the last three years in this zip code. If I knew someone was supposed to be in my results and they did not appear, you would, you know, comment out the code line by line until you figured out which line was throwing this guy out and then you would fix it.

And then you would add it back. And now your code works. I asked him, why can’t you do that? Why can’t you put me in for this result? Go through the code line by line. Let’s see where I’m getting kicked out. And then either help me make that change, put it in search console as a, a flag saying, Oh, you’re being kicked out because you are doing this or you are not doing that or your ad density, this or whatever it is.

Um, so that I can fix it or you guys can fix your code, whichever end it’s on. And they said, that’s not how it works. Okay. That’s not how algorithms are. We cannot see line by line details like that. We can’t troubleshoot it that way. So that made me feel like. They can’t fix their algorithm. Um, they have to just make big changes to it and see How it shakes out

Jared: to that end because that was a resounding theme that people walked away with and so a lot of people have Gone to machine learning as a big reason for that, you know, we uh, We know that machine learning is a big part of how Google’s algorithms work.

Was machine learning talked about or discussed, whether at the engineer level, or on the higher level in some of these other conversations that were happening at the summit?

Morgan: Nobody directly said anything about machine learning, no. It was kind of, as we kept saying, why can’t you fix the algorithm? They just kept saying, we can’t.

We can’t, we cannot physically go in there and do it. I’ve since read a lot about zeros and ones and all this different stuff. So I believe then that it must be machine learning, but that was never confirmed.

Jared: I glossed over a bit and I, I didn’t mean to, so I want to maybe give us a chance to go back.

There were those creator presentations, the three minutes each, right? And with 20 people in the room, that had to have been an hour or two of,

Morgan: I don’t want

Jared: to say very different takes, but like a lot of different creators. Bringing different angles at it. What stood out to you about that? And I do realize I’m going a little bit back in the timeline here, but I didn’t give it the space it needed.

What stood out to you? We kind of heard what you focused on. We know what Jake focused on, but there were 18 other creators there. What else? What else stood out?

Morgan: Most all the women cried. Um, it was very emotional. Um, some people chose to focus on their personal impact. Um, some people were just very angry.

Um, a lot of people talking about big brands like Forbes and all of this. Um, but the resounding thing was that everyone who was there was writing about their passions. And this was a very personal thing. A lot of us put Our full identity into our work whether we are our work or just Seeing that success has built you up to be such a part of your identity that this has been just so traumatic for everyone and being devalued and the emotional impacts of that as well as financial.

But it was very like a sad hour. It was very much like a funeral, very much like a sad memorial. There was no like funny stories to break up the sadness. Like you might have a memorial. It was just sad. Um, angry. Some people, a lot of people had written out full, um, speeches that they prepared. Some people winged it.

But it was very clear. Everyone’s passion. Everyone’s humanity. Some people spoke up for others. There was one woman in particular who listed out like five or six other websites that were not even her own with as specific examples, um, that had shut down or been very hardly impacted. It was just. It was sad, man.

It was, it was rough. Yeah.

Jared: The, uh, kind of elephant in the room was the closing statement or the closing chat with, uh, Pandu Nayak, who from all we know is kind of in charge around search.

Morgan: Right. It was a terrible choice to bring him. I’m sure let’s throw it out there. Cause I’ve said everywhere else. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but he was a really, really bad choice to speak at all.

They should not have brought him at all at all. I don’t know what Danny was thinking and Danny was like hugging on him. So I guess they’re friends, but, um, It was a really, really bad choice to end with him, because I feel like with the conversations, people were really feeling heard by some of the engineers, and then we bring in this final panel, and this was the end, like there was no closing after this, it was, this was the end, and it was him and Elizabeth again, and he just said, there is, he, the big thing, I can’t get over anything, is that, it’s He said, there is no classifier.

There are not site wide penalties, only page level queries. And we were like, especially Jake, I know Jake spoke up at this time. Yes, there is a site wide classifier. I can tell you can type in my site name. It doesn’t show up. Um, other people are showing up and I’m not like, I fell off on one day. I fell off for all queries.

It wasn’t just one. Like we. And it was really bad. Pandu said, I cannot predict what will happen when asked if there was any hope to recover. I cannot predict what will happen. We are just focused on doing great things for our users. And I wrote down in my notes, hopeless and demoralizing, because his whole speech made, left me feeling hopeless and demoralized about search because if the guy in charge doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter if I sat at lunch with an intern and convinced him that I’m a real person writing real things, he should look into it.

He’s doing what his boss is told by his boss to do. And I really, really got the impression that they don’t think that search is that bad. They’re sorry that you and me and the people in the room were, are impacted negatively, but They still kind of saw us as like, you’re kind of like a scammer spammer, you know, out of here.

It’s our results are still fine Um, they’re good enough for the user and we are focused on the user We’re they he never said anything positive about creators anything about your work is good. We value you you are important He just said we’re focused on making it great for our users And there is no sitewide classifier.

So it was it was great Felt like we were being lied to and gaslit and left on a very negative note, but we did go straight to the bar after that. So

Jared: I, I guess a follow up question there, and I realize this is totally speculative in just your opinion, but I think you were in the room. So you get the luxury of reading, you know, faces and body language and, um, unspoken things and all that.

I mean, do you, I guess the question I would ask is, do you think that he really believes there is no site wide classifier and was speaking from a place of, um, Um, knowledge, truth, and that means certain things about the algorithm, or do you think he’s aware of it, and this was more of the kind of Google messaging robot system at play, saying there isn’t a site wide classifier, all I can talk about is our users, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like, which side of it do you think it ended up, which side, if you had to predict, was he on on that one?

Morgan: Well, he’s either a liar, or he doesn’t know how Google search works. And he’s the head of Google search. So I would lean towards liar, but, um, I, it’s hard for me to say for sure. I do know that when the helpful content first came out, it said in their documentation that it was a site wide thing. So, and then they quickly took that away or quietly took that away.

I. Think that the engineers and everyone really didn’t think it was site wide until they started looking at things So I think that is the line that they are saying it is not site wide But you cannot look at the examples that we showed them And the things that we talked about and not question that in some way

Jared: Jake mentioned at one point that I think he said danny They regretted calling it the helpful content update, and that obviously has become a very triggering term for pretty much everyone in the online community that that that writes on the Internet, right?

Let me ask you this. If they had long ago 2022, which is actually when it first launched, but 2023 the impactful and if they had called it the like, this is how our algorithm works update instead of the helpful content update. And the results had gone the way they they have gone. Do you think you’d be as frustrated?

And do you think this comp for this summit would have been as frustrating? Do you think the fact that they called it the helpful content update? And it’s almost this backwards slam on everyone who was impacted? Um, do you think that has a role in it? Or do you think that it doesn’t really matter? It is what it is.

And the fact that they have, you know, kind of destroyed a lot of small publishers is really actually the root of the problem.

Morgan: Yeah, obviously I would be pissed either way that they ruined my business and ruined my life. But, um, the problem with calling it helpful was that so prior to the helpful content update, I was not a part of SEO Twitter at all.

I had like an old Twitter account, but I never looked at it. And after the helpful content update, some people told me that was how I could follow what was going on. So that’s what I got on. And the problem with calling it helpful. Really led to it hurting my self esteem and me taking it very personally.

Because as I’ve said, this is content that I, things that I create with my bare hands and write about and take pictures. I don’t have a team. I don’t have employees. Like, this is me. It is a complete reflection of me. And to say that it is unhelpful means that I’m unhelpful. And this has really kind of defined my life for the last decade and calling it unhelpful when my whole website is about helping people renovate their home.

It was like, It sent me into a spiraling depression. It gave me a lot of identity issues. Um, so many SEO bros on Twitter were coming at me and saying, you know, well, look at your website and look at the one that’s there, the result that is beating you now. And just think, why are you not as helpful as them?

And it really just was horrible mentally on me. And I know I spoke to other people at the event that felt the same way. It had just been a mental breakdown. because of the word helpful. It had been just very, very hard mentally. I do want to share that they said they don’t want to use the word helpful anymore.

They want to use the word satisfying, which if you watch the office, I turned to the girl next to me and I said, you’ve always left me satisfied and smiling. But, um, it was, uh, satisfying is not really any better. I mean, I guess a little bit, I understand they’re trying to satisfy the user might be better than helpful, but So it turned into the whole day.

We telling them, telling Google that their response was not helpful or satisfying. So we did get that little jab into them a little bit, but no progress was really made.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. Um, well thanks for sharing. I, um, yeah, I mean, you can just hear it on the, in the, in the voices of publishers all over, you know, how, It’s been for their business, but really how awful it’s been for kind of this third party to accuse, um, you know, individual publishers about what it is and what isn’t helpful.

And, and especially

Morgan: when peers like other blogging this whole time with me putting out very similar content, we’re not hit. Then it’s like, wow, that makes me feel bad compared to them. And when you talk to them, they don’t, Understand the scope. So they say like, Oh, you must be doing something spammy. You must be doing something weird.

Just stop whatever you’re doing and you’ll be fine. And so it’s created this weird vibe within the community, which didn’t exist before in the like blogger community in that way.

Jared: I’ve likened it in the past when talking about it with different peers to like, almost like taking a college class, uh, you know, where the final, the final paper was something you wrote about some topic, right?

And I remember, um, this was a poly sci class. And so we were, you know, I had my cohort of friends I studied with and like, we went to class every day with, uh, We took notes together. We reviewed all the notes together. We kind of had the same approach and take on the paper. We would share the paper and talk, Oh, you can make that better.

Oh, change that. Oh, here’s what I thought about. And then we submitted our papers. I remember I got like a C and my colleague got an A. And I was, I was like, okay, well, why did I get a C? And they were like, well, it just wasn’t as good. And I’m like, okay, well, what wasn’t as good? Well, it just wasn’t as good.

You know, like it just didn’t have the impact. And, you know, so all these echoes of things where I’m like, man, I’m going to math. A plus B equals C every time. And if I don’t get it right, I don’t get it right.

Morgan: Right. Yeah. You just aren’t satisfying, Jared, yeah.

Jared: Exactly. So I, I just, I hear a lot of that in, in what you’re saying.

Um, you know, I mean, maybe let’s spend the last few minutes talking about where does this leave you? Um, where, where have you transitioned? You, you kind of said at the outset, like, Hey, thankfully you had a lot of traffic from other sources. You had a lot of revenue from other sources. So. What are you doing either as a result of the helpful content update results, not the Web Summit specifically

Morgan: or

Jared: and or anything different that’s come out of the Web Summit that you’ve pivoted on or acted further on?

Morgan: Right. So, I mean, my conclusion from this Web Summit was that They know that we are creating helpful content. They know that it is not appearing in search. They know that there is a disconnect there. They do not know how to fix it. They might work on it. They might not. If the boss doesn’t think it’s an issue, I have it really hard to believe that these engineers time is going to be spent changing this.

So I think. If they accidentally fix it for some people and algorithm changes moving forward, then they will. Um, I do not think they are going to reverse this in any way, shape, or form. I don’t think they could reverse it if they really wanted to. And Danny made sure to say September traffic is not coming back.

Even if you have this classifier, if it was lifted because of changes in the SERPs, in the layouts and the AI overviews and all of this, your traffic would be lower either way. So while I do think that search traffic is an important part of any balanced websites, um, traffic sources, you cannot build a site depending just on that today, and you have to have a plan to diversify both in your traffic.

And in your income. So we’re leaning heavily onto Pinterest right now, but I’m Pinterest. I’ve been on Pinterest for over a decade. They do algorithm updates too. And it can be just like Google overnight. You could lose everything. Um, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened soon with all of the AI mess that’s being spammed over there.

Um, I think it’s important. That you think about who your user is and how they like to consume Information so for me because I am actually doing things and my target audience is kind of like me Um, like women or some men in their 30s to 40s Um trying to do projects in their home. I think a lot of that audience is video right now video consumption So we have really pivoted to a video first model.

We’re taking videos with our crafts and projects and And starting there, still creating blog posts, but I’m not writing these long blog posts with sections and FAQs and all of that anymore. Forget it. You get two paragraph intro and a supply list and a tutorial and a bunch of pictures, which are mostly screenshots for my videos.

And that’s it. That’s what I’m doing for now. If things reappear from Google, maybe I’ll start writing some of that long tail keyword stuff again, or writing more robust articles. But for now, There’s no point to it. And when you send people from Facebook or Pinterest on their phone, they don’t want to read all that anyway.

So I think it’s probably better for the user experience, but focusing on where your audience is and how you can reach them in the way they want to consume content. And then how to monetize that is, that’s the tricky part because the video just doesn’t monetize as well. As the blog,

Jared: yeah, what winds have you had, you know, since it was, since this started since September, 2023, like, have you seen some gains in, in, in other areas that you put focus in or, you know, like what’s trending towards your audience resonating with now that you’re not so focused on the, the website blogging side of things.

Morgan: So Pinterest, I mean, we’re still putting out four articles a week on Charleston crafted. So we’re not stopped writing whatsoever, but, um. I started in January, a push for Pinterest. Um, my main website is up, I think 200 percent on Pinterest traffic compared to last year. And one of my small secondary sites is up like 10 X or more.

Pinterest has done very well for that. Um, video, my husband started a new Instagram account in February and he’s got 48, 000 followers already. Primarily, they’re using the link DM feature to send people to either blog posts, digital product that’s woodworking. So it’s, we sell woodworking plans, And then affiliates, um, sending people to, you know, tools or things to purchase.

So that’s been a big win and YouTube is going well for us. Um, it’s not like gangbusters, but it is when we create the video, we share it everywhere. So it’s, it’s growing steadily over there.

Jared: You know, I do a lot of interviews, right? One a week. I talked to a lot of creators, many of whom have had to pivot away from a primarily SEO strategy into something different, right?

Traffic from Pinterest, traffic from YouTube, traffic from Instagram or other socials or email marketing, these sorts of things. And, you know, to take it all the way back, like you talked about it, you, how you’ve been doing this for a very long time, right? Like the growth takes time. And I almost feel like.

We’re at the beginning of all these creators pivots into other areas, and it’s going to take time to get really big success stories out of it. Like we’re getting early success stories, like your husband’s Instagram account. You’re 200 percent up on Pinterest, actually 10 X up on a different Pinterest account.

But to really get these big, big wins, these longstanding wins, it feels like it’s gonna take some time because so many people had to pivot. And it’s been a year plus, right? It hasn’t been a decade, uh, which really it took you a decade to get your brand to where it was before Google pulled out the rug from underneath you, you know?

Morgan: Right. I definitely agree. I have a girlfriend that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month off of affiliate links from Instagram. And so I started a similar Instagram thinking I could just blast out affiliate links, target busy moms. Uh, go for Amazon and it has been a very humbling experience, um, because I am used to being successful and what I do and having to start at zero.

It is an uphill battle. They say like the first thousand, the first a hundred thousand is the hardest. It is definitely. A battle, but I would say anybody who’s in this situation. You have to decide are you Trying to make a long term business or were you just trying to make a quick buck off of seo? If you were just trying to make a quick buck off seo, I would move to something else Totally, I would abandon the website.

I would you know, go do your amazon videos or go Do um, you know pick a new line This is going to be a lot of work. If you are trying to build a long term brand, um, you got to come up with other ways to reach people with that brand, whether it’s creating a physical product. Um, we’re talking about creating a physical product for next year, woodworking product, which will be really exciting if we can get it to work.

Um, digital products. I’m a big proponent of digital products. We make several thousand dollars a month off of selling PDFs, which is, you know, Wild to me, but it really does like small sales add up, but you got to work at it. Um, whether you want to work with brands, I mean, there’s a lot of leg in that, but you do have to put in the work and you have to get there.

It’s not going to happen quickly. And if you’re, even if you built up this Google site, It’s kind of worthless now. It’s not going to help you pivot to anything else. You have to decide if you’re a business owner or if you’re just kind of like a hustler and follow the right path.

Jared: Any final thoughts? I mean, I’m sure so many, right?

Like, like how much time do you have? But any final thoughts on, you know, just all of our conversation points? Um, uh, it’s kind of an open floor in that, in that question.

Morgan: Yeah. Um, I know a lot of people have had a really bad year. And it’s been really hard, really emotional. I want you to know, if that was you.

If you’re not a spammer, not a scammer, you’re a good content creator, your content is good. This is not a reflection of your content. Google is broken. They know they are not surfacing the best content. They’re trying to figure it out, but you have to move on. Think of this as like A bad ex boyfriend who keeps calling you back saying hang around, we’ll be coming back, oh maybe I’ll be back, you can’t wait around for that you up text coming in the middle of the night.

You have to move on, and if it comes back later, you know, let them go, and if they come back it’s meant to be, or whatever the thing is people say, you have to mentally move on, whatever that looks like for you, mentally move on. It’s been a year. You can’t be sad for any longer get excited about find something that makes you excited in this business, whether that’s recording videos, whether that’s creating a product, whether it’s totally pivoting to teaching people how to do something instead of, um, showing them articles, um, whatever you can do.

Find something that gets you excited and start over. You did it once, you can do it again.

Jared: Yeah. Yep. Well, good words, Morgan. Thanks for coming on and sharing everything. I mean, it’s, uh, yeah, you summed it up best. It’s been a rough year for people who have gotten a lot of traffic from Google historically by creating helpful content.

It’s got both the business implications and the emotional implications all rolled into one big, you know, ball of wax I guess as the phrase goes So, um, I think you’ve done a great job coming on and addressing the business side of things while also addressing perhaps a lot of the emotional side of things that people are feeling and That’s a lot harder to put into words or at least that’s a lot harder to share on Twitter or tell your family member Like that side of it.

So I think it’s super. Um, it was really great to have you on to talk about the summit, but also just to hear you give voice to a lot of the emotions that I’m sure a lot of us are feeling me included, by the way, because I’m right there with you, um, as a content creator and stuff. So, um, I know you’re not really, really, you know, you got your website, but if people want to connect with you, is that the best place to do it anywhere else?

People can kind of connect with you.

Morgan: If you want to buy some woodworking plans, I got them. But if you’re into DIY and home decor, check us out, Charleston Crafted. Otherwise, I’m on Twitter, Charleston Craft. I guess my letters got cut off. I don’t know. But, um, on Twitter I just complain about Google. And SEO.

So you can follow me there if you’re interested.

Jared: Morgan. Thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. It’s great to have, I almost called a part two, right? A part two on the web summit. I’m pretty proud. We got 10 percent of the audience there has now been on the niche pursuits podcast to kind of give different side of things.

So thanks for coming on.

Morgan: Thank you, Jared.

Jared: All right. Talk soon.

Morgan: Thank you. Have a good afternoon.