Good morning! Ready to get to it?

Last week, a lot of sites experienced some big changes to their traffic. Some saw their traffic increase…. while others watched their numbers plummet. Which means, of course… Google made another change to their search algorithm.

Below, we’ll talk about this update and what it means.

Plus, let’s talk about whether having a community (like a forum or a group) is worth having. It isn’t the same for everybody.

So, I’ve got my fresh-brewed coffee in hand. ☕️ Surrounded by monitors in my home office before the sun comes up. And I’m ready to get writing. ✍️

Let’s go…

Here’s what’s on the menu for this issue…

• Should You Bother Creating A Community For Your Site?

• Google’s “Helpful Content” Update = Lots Of Traffic Changes

• Updates to Kadence, TutorLMS, Block Visibility and more

Featured This Week

Should You Bother Creating A Community For Your Site?

A couple weeks ago, I basically retired the forums that have existed on the Blog Marketing Academy. Then last week, I had a couple of clients make quite different decisions with regards to their own community.

One was using BuddyBoss but essentially none of the community functionality of the plugin, so we’re going to be switching him to something else and not worry about the community. The other client is embracing community (via BuddyBoss) completely and going all-in.

So, which is better? Is it worth the extra work, expense and time to build up social functionality into your site?

As you probably expect, there’s no right answer here. It really depends on your own goals.

I know for me personally, I have found that having a community violates my own 80/20 rule. In other words, it takes more effort than the results I get out of it. It isn’t worth my time. A forum on my site is like a little side show that has pretty much nothing to do with what my business does, so it isn’t worth it.

Plus, I’ll be frank…. when I brought the community from Facebook over into my own site, engagement dropped. This was certainly no surprise to me and I fully expected that to happen. Here and there people would post questions in the forum. Thing is… people also went for long periods of time without an answer because I was simply too busy to remember to get in there and reply. That’s not a good look. 🤪

Plus, it does take extra plugins and extra tech stuff to run the community. And I just didn’t think it was very useful. So, I retired it. I originally launched the forums with ideas of it turning into a nice source of user-generated content, but I just found it wasn’t worth the effort over time. It didn’t fit ME. It doesn’t fit my schedule nor my goals here. So, I dropped it.

For most clients and people I speak to who bring up the idea of starting up communities, I usually warn them.

I warn them that it will take up far more time than they think.

I warn them that it can easily look like a ghost town with hardly anybody saying anything. That that fact alone can actually hurt your reputation because people think there’s not much happening.

It takes work to build up an engaged community. A lot of work. A lot of time. Heck, some people end up hiring dedicated community managers for this kind of thing. Building and managing a community of the likes most of us think of as “ideal” is just way more work than you think.

For most, it isn’t worth it. That’s my opinion.

But, if community is a key part of your business strategy and you’re ready to do what it takes to run it and build up the activity, then…. go for it. A truly engaged community is an awesome resource and asset. There’s no doubt about it. Just… a lot of work to build. And you need to decide if that supports your ultimate goals or… gets in the way.

And as much as I promote digital sovereignty and would warn of the risks of building up a community on land somebody else owns (such as Facebook), I’ll be the first to tell you that that route is easier. Facebook is easy. People are familiar with it. And engagement is always easier there. There’s definitely a solid case for using a Facebook Group. Just know the risks… and make the right decision for you.

I’ve decided that… if I ever bring back a community for my own business, I’ll probably just use Facebook. Heck, being able to do a Facebook Live right into the group for free is one heck of a benefit. Try that in a self-hosted forum. 😉 

Keep things simple… or don’t bother.

Google’s “Helpful Content” Update = Lots Of Traffic Changes

Last week, I was seeing quite a few site owners over on X complaining about sudden drops in their web traffic. Others saw nice increases.

Check the replies on this tweet to see some of the mixed results people have been seeing:

I will say, my own traffic went up, too. Not as drastically as I had seen from some folks on X, but definitely a spike upward. And an increase in both search impressions and clicks from Google Search Console.

Of course, this means Google issues yet another algorithm change. This one is being called the “helpful content” update. And like all updates to Google Search, some people made out OK while others had their stats suffer pretty hard.

Here’s the jist of what has happened in this update…

First, the whole idea here is that Google wants to promote quality content and they want to reduce the exposure to content that is determined not to be helpful. They use machine learning to determine this and, of course, they’re not going to outright tell you how it is determined. 😎

But, this part of their page talking about it is interesting. It says…

In other words, they’re looking at sites as a whole. Not just individual blog posts or what have you. If your site has “relatively high amounts” of unhelpful content, your whole site can suffer.

What is “helpful content”, you may ask? Well, Google has guidance on that. Of course, you can take what they tell you (which is vague and mostly common sense) and you couple that with your own judgement. And, like they say, do a self-assessment.

As part of this update, Google has also updated their guidance with regard to AI-generated content. Interestingly, they actually loosened their wording a bit on this one. Before, they specifically said helpful content was to be “written by people”. Now, they’ve removed that. While you’re still going to be penalized badly for stupidly just re-posting AI-generated content, Google is obviously OK with you using AI as a tool in creating helpful content. Google is open to use of AI. Which makes sense, really. Just don’t be stupid and copy-and-paste stuff from ChatGPT. That will backfire like crazy.

Another aspect of this update has to do with posting third-party content on your main website. The short version is that 3rd-party content included on your own site can be included in site-wide signals on whether you have helpful content. Google recommends that you block third-party content from being indexed by Google so that it does not impact your own rankings.

A few other things that are interesting in the guidance changes from Google…

If you go and make barely any change to a post and it kicks the “last updated” date up to the present, Google doesn’t like that. They want to see real updates. It would be best to keep the “last updated” date from changing if all you did was fix a typo, for instance.

Another gem…

Not messing around, are they. 🤣

The big motto to all this (and this is nothing new) is…. you can’t really hack your way to top rankings in the SERPs. The old-school tricks of the SEO industry don’t really work very well anymore. These days, you really gotta bring it. There’s still SEO strategies you can employ, of course, however the most important skill to it is just being one hell of a good content creator. You can’t fake it. You’ve either gotta produce good stuff people will value… or you need to pay somebody who can do it for you.

I really think the only reason the Blog Marketing Academy made out OK during this update is because:

1. I do try like hell to create helpful content.

2. I’ve been working on a content audit across my entire for several months now (and it is still ongoing).

I’ve updated a lot of content. Still much more to do, but I’ve done a lot. I’ve also deleted a ton of stuff that was just old, useless and wasn’t worth spending any time on.

So, if your site got smashed in this latest update, a content audit is probably in order for you.

For me, updating older content is actually a bigger part of my content strategy these days than posting new stuff. There’s just so much to work with already… why re-invent the wheel?

WordPress Quick Bits…

Kadence Blocks was updated to 3.1.16. This release has 3 new features which are:

• Conditional fields on the Advanced Form Builder.

• Pexels integration (a free image source)

• Shape masks for the Progress Bar block. (Useful for things like star ratings, for instance)

You can read more about the update here.

TutorLMS has updated to 2.3. Some highlights for this release are:

• Secure your online course against hot-linking

• Option to disable right-clicking, supposedly to prevent content copying

• Hide recommended videos when embedding Youtube videos using Tutor Player.

You can read about this TutorLMS update here.

LearnDash has gotten a new course dashboard feature. A way to see the global stats of your course all on one screen. Potentially handy.

Block Visibility has updated to 3.1. This update included controls for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. Basically, what this plugin does is allows you to show or hide blocks based on a number of available criteria. I myself love using it to show/hide things based on whether they’re logged-in or not. With this latest update, you can now control blocks based on things such as the product they’re current looking at, cart contents, customer purchase history and more. For instance, want to show a call to action for a product but only to people who haven’t purchased it? Now you can. Cool.

There’s a new project online called Skelementor. If you use the Elementor page builder, this site offers a TON of pre-design page components for you. It is completely free and all you have to do is hit the button to copy a component to your clipboard… the paste it into Elementor. Great resource.