After 8 Years of Hard Work, This Hurt

The Google Apocalypse

Now the funny part of this story, is that at the same time I stepped back to focus on the big project, the biggest and most used search engine pushed out a ‘core update’ which included a ‘helpful content’ element.

They were determining with their machines whether content on websites was ‘helpful’ and if they decided it wasn’t, they were ‘hitting’ sites with a sort of penalty.

The penalty meant that people asking questions like ‘how is cotton made’ or ‘plus size sewing pattern for plus sized people’ would not be shown my website anymore, because Google had suddenly decided that my website didn’t contain ‘helpful’ content.

Quite laughable really when you look at the number of comments left on my website over the years all saying that it’s ‘incredibly helpful’ or words to that effect.

In fact, here’s a screenshot from a tool that Google provides to keep track on what’s doing well on my website.

On the far left, you can see I was getting between 2500 and 3500 visitors to my website every day from Google… 52 MILLION impressions over the past 16 months…

Except in the screenshot above you can see that 29 million were in the first six months from mid April 2023 through to October 3rd 2023, when suddenly I got ‘hit’ again and my website traffic went down AGAIN.

Fast forward to the last three months – so mid May to mid August at the time of writing – and it’s even more evident how Google is penalizing my website… just shy of 4 million impressions in three months.

You can’t make this up.. but imagine losing 90% of your income, through no fault of your own, just because you were creating *helpful content* that Google decided was no longer helpful?

The Rise of Ai

There are two things to ‘blame’ if we’re looking to assign blame.

The first is Google and its greedy shareholders, wanting to keep all the search traffic on its platform generating more ad income for themselves. Which I understand to an extent, being that my website earns an income from the ads on it (which was how I could make so many tutorials for free while still paying my rent).

At the same time, I despise capitalist behavior where big monopolies hoard and hoard, and let the little fish drown. I’m not the only ‘blogger’ who has lost most of their website traffic and income because Google got greedy.

The second element to blame is the rise of Ai.

An Ai chat ‘bot’ called Chat GPT came out in autumn 2022 (approximately) and with it, a bunch of tools that enables unscrupulous people to generate written content really fast. This content was then uploaded to websites, without being fact checked and created a ridiculous amount of data for search engines to ‘crawl’ through to sift the good from the bad.

If you’ve searched anything on Google in the last 18 months, you’ve probably comes across the crappy Ai content and thought ‘whaaaaaat even is this rubbish’?

Just to clarify: I have never written and published anything on this website with Ai. I’ve also never used Ai generated images here either. Most photos you see are taken by me, with my trusty Panasonic Lumix camera, unless it’s something I don’t have access to – like a cotton field – and I pay for one from a stock photo site.

What’s Next for The Creative Curator

I’m not going to lie.. when I saw the traffic and my income crashing even further in March of this year, I was in tears. I am still angry and frustrated watching what I worked hard to build be ‘devalued’ in such a way, especially when people tell me how amazing the content is.

I thought about quitting and selling the website, but in all honesty, the effect of the last 12 months means that I wouldn’t get anywhere close to what the website is actually worth in terms of work invested into it.

I earned $17 USD yesterday, and when you multiply that by 31, you can see I won’t be able to pay half of my share of the rent (again) this month. Which puts the ‘monetary value’ of the website at less than $20,000. Selling at that price for almost eight years work would just be foolhardy.

So, I’ve decided f*ck it…

Why should I pander to what ‘search engines’ want? Why should the likes of Google get to decide what I do or don’t write about here on my website?

So from this day onwards, you’ll see a mix of content on my blog. I’ll still be writing about sewing, pattern making and fabrics. I’ll be creating more tutorials and guide once this big project is completed.

But I’ll also be posting arty videos from a second YouTube channel that I have – which has kept my mental health stable throughout the last 12 months – and I’ll also be posting about fiber arts I love to do too, like crochet, knitting and weaving.

If its creative and crafty and I enjoy it as part of my life, I will write it and put it here for myself and anyone else interested in reading it.

I’ll even have a chatty ‘blog’ section too, where you can catch up on more personal type posts too!

And if you’re only after sewing patterns, they’ll be over on my personal website / webshop Eve Tokens Patterns.

As I write this, I learned that there is *another* update taking place with Google. I suspect it’ll end up taking away the remaining couple of hundred visitors it still sends me – because why let the little fish swim and survive when they can be crushed and gobbled up by a shark and their updates?

But if you’re reading this, you found me somehow, and you stuck around to the end. So thank you. From the bottom of my heart for your support, for your kindness and for just being here today.

Much love,

Eve