The Enshitification Of Google And Building A New Business

How I pivoted and built a retirement business in six weeks

I have been in a lot of marketing businesses over the last 30 years, some amazingly lucrative, some hard work, some that totally sucked and failed miserably, but over the last few months or so I have been evaluating what I want to do, and what I want to work on with the rest of my time before I shuffle off this mortal coil. 

Let me give you some context on why I am writing this post…

I love writing, be that copy or content, I started to build a blog in a niche I love, unfortunately whilst it is still relatively easy to rank in the search engines (if you have an established site), you are now extremely lucky to get on the first page of Google because of the AI content, sponsored links, Reddit posts, and content farms run by huge media organizations.

In the niche I am in, a major publisher recently entered the market and in the past two months has published over 300 articles, mostly AI written with some human editing, and they have begun to dominate at least one of the two organic slots left in Google’s page one results.

What impact does this have?

Let me give you an example. I wrote a review article in June. It was for a product I bought to test out. I loved it, made a video about it, made a gallery of 13 images, wrote a 1943 word detailed article about it, scored it, added schema data, and also pointed out some of its failures. There was also an affiliate link to Amazon so that people could buy it. This whole process took me two days.

By mid-July it was ranking at the bottom of the first page of Google.

I was averaging 230 daily visits to the page, and whilst I am not making any money from ads on this site I generated decent affiliate income… This one page made  $47 a day (average) which I was pretty happy about.

The first problem came when Google decided to put a big AI generated box at the top, the thing is the content it generated was not on target, it talked about the usage of this type of product (mostly taken from WikiPedia) and had a few links to reviews of other products. (not the one I was writing about) and my site was not referenced.

The result… 27% less clicks overnight.

Then came the big media content farm. They wrote an article which was obviously scraped from my article, and re-written by AI. The video was removed, the schema removed,  but the images were kept, and my list of failures was almost identical. Their final article came in at 692 words… It also had three large ads, and a sponsored ‘other posts you might like’ style box, not linking to anywhere also on their site)

I was pushed to page two.

The result… 19 visits a day, with the affiliate commission dropping to $1.09 a day.

I was bummed, but still positive about the niche. I had just started list building on this site and had created a really good lead-magnet, and the list was starting to generate traffic.

By the middle of August however the content farm had scraped my entire site, and had re-written pretty much every article I had created. Traffic dropped by 93% and I had just one article on page one of Google.

I’m not usually the type of person to get disheartened by things. I usually see knockbacks as a challenge, but this time I couldn’t. For all Google’s rhetoric about banning AI content, it seems like if you are a big media organization then those rules don’t apply.

… and as part of my testing I decided to launch a new site, on a new topic to see just how hard it is to get ranked from scratch.

I registered a domain, created eight articles with exact match keyword phrases that have never appeared in Google, and got two of my clients who are in broadly similar niches to link to these articles. These clients have massive domain authority and have had sites live for 14+ years.

I am now seven weeks into this experiment and not one of these pages show up for an exact match search. They are sandboxed. On the other hand I wrote a Reddit post with the phrase as its title three days ago and it is already the first organic result.

So yes, I could game the system, but I am tired of fighting the fight. Life is way too short to think about this and be putting out fires everyday.

So, back to the beginning. 

I haven’t taken on new consulting clients since the beginning of the year, and my commitment to them ends this Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, consulting is fun, I love being involved in other people’s businesses, and I love the 5-15% commissions I get, but it is a monster time, and mental suck.

So I will be sad, but glad to see this end.

I don’t think I will ever truly retire, I like ‘the work’ too much, but I do want to focus on one thing. One thing that I really enjoy and want to wake up and work on each and every day…

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, an inordinate amount of time in-fact. I took a deep-dive and spent an awful lot of effort, and money on research… and six weeks ago I finally got started.

It paid off.

… and a lot quicker than I was expecting.

By the end of October I made £2,430 ($3,068), I am now on track to earn £5,000+ by the end of November and the sky’s the limit. I reckon I will hit the £10k mark sometime in February, even with the Q1 slump.

… a big win, and a fun new business I really enjoy working on. 

Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean I am stopping writing, I get a lot of satisfaction from writing The Raine Report and reading all the emails I get. 

And next week I will share some more details about what I am up to.

Until then, have a great weekend.

Dan