Rewrite the index one update at a time
With each Google index algo update, the dice are rolled again. And like any algorithm, it simply does what it’s programmed to do. The algo doesn’t care if you’ve had that website for years or if it’s really relevant, because the index itself can’t test your app, website, SaaS.
It just analyzes the accessible website content.
In the last days on december 2024, my latest micro SaaS audio2text.email was completly sanboxed. That means the ranking search terms it was associated with went so hight that it is now invisible.
In one update, you are invisible.
Running the same searches now yields entirely new results. That’s literally a kick in the b***. Still, I find some positive takeaways from this algo update:
- New search results mean discovering new competitors.
- Realizing Google’s index may not produce the best results and might omit some important ones.
- My pSEO experiment (having a page for each internet provider in Germany, showing if they’re compatible with Fritz!Box—enabling voicemail forwarding via email, thereby targeting Fritz!Box users as potential clients of audio2text.email) has failed.
- Thinking that ranking for a keyword included in your TLD might work for six months, but it’s not enough.
With every update, the index evolves daily. But according to internet rumors, when you’re sandboxed by Google, it’s tough to come back. Affaire à suivre.
In 3 months a new algo will be push to prod, it will recalibrate itself, and the cycle will continue.
The impact of the algo change, I mean the sandboxing is quite hard and not plaisant to my ego. But, let’s face it, relaying on a single source of lead feels risky.
Hopefully I was not working on that site since 25 years like that user on reddit:
Far be it from me to complain — the index isn’t a public space, and maybe like you, I need to experience these things for myself.
So What next?
Rebuild a new version of the website:
- Remove all pSEO pages
- Improve the index and the use case pages
- Keep the pages count low
Building only one lead stream from SEO feels risky, no? I guess I need to see if cold emails may also get me somewhere.