02/21/2024
Study: What growing sites on Google have in common, and what falling sites have in common
Cyrus Shepherd conducted a study of 50 sites that significantly lost or gained organic traffic after Google's updates between August and December 2023.
Terms:
- The sites were "content" sites, monetised by advertising and affiliate links.
- For each site, he researched the page that lost the most traffic.
- All sites were evaluated on mobile devices.
- Information on 2500+ UX and on-page elements was collected.
- Analysed the correlation between the change in traffic and these elements (not necessarily causation)
Grew sites that have:
- Described personal experiences rather than retelling someone else's experience
- The first 1000 words of text included the first person pronouns "I", "we", "my" and "our" (apparently also for the reason that personal experience is so often presented).
- There is consent to the use of cookies.
- There are contacts somewhere on the page
- A call to action at the top
Fell sites that have:
- An advert stuck to the bottom of the page. Which do not disappear with page flipping, often covering the main content. Example.
- Video adverts that follow the user. Which also doesn't disappear as the user scrolls.
- Not unique images
- Lots of adverts on the page. Declining sites had up to 38 ad units per page. Growing ones have a maximum of 25.
- Push notifications. Falling sites often had urges to sign up for them. But no winning site used them.
- Huge menu in the header or at the bottom. A huge menu was considered when the number of links was more than 30. Since the study involved informational sites, menus with a large number of items in most cases were not needed by users and were made apparently for SEO purposes.
- Unclear/absent logo
- Search form at the bottom of the page
- No contacts
- Large number of affiliate links.
64% of fallen sites had such links, growing ones had 36%.
Growing sites had a maximum of 43 links. The fallen had a maximum of 145.
