Why did housefresh.com lose 91% of its traffic?

The suggestions and tips provided by the responding SEO specialists include:

  1. The content on the site feels like a massive lump that no human is meant to actually consume. It doesn’t feel very “helpful”.
  2. Searchers likely preferred other content over what was provided on the site.
  3. MFA (Made For AdSense) is likely the reason for the traffic drop, based on looking at the website.
  4. The site fails the “BS test” – it seems to only do things to cream cash from users, as evidenced by the navbar items like “Best”, “Review”, “VS”, “Guides”.
  5. There is too much content for the sake of content. For example, the “best dehumidifiers” page opens with a long essay on historical dehumidifier recalls in China in 2021 before even acknowledging the search intent.
  6. The WordPress platform may have been “criminalized” by Google.
  7. The user experience (UX) is overwhelming, with issues like requiring cookie acceptance just to watch an embedded YouTube video.
  8. The site’s anchor text profile may be involved, possibly due to spam-blasting it themselves at the end.
  9. Google’s constant algorithm changes have been ruthless in killing small, independent websites like this one.
  10. The site needs to do what Google wants, as the search giant is now “doing evil on the daily”.
  11. The page 1 UI has extra copy. For long-form content, a table of contents in a subnav is recommended. The copy should also be edited to be more concise.
  12. The UI could be an issue due to tons of text. Using “read more” toggles can lead to better engagement.
  13. The March update may not have been nuanced enough to differentiate bad review sites from ones providing good information. Google just goes by what “looks” like the type of sites they’re targeting.
  14. On-page optimizations are needed, such as making the star rating more prominent since it’s often the first thing users want to see.
  15. Review sites seem to have been hit hard by the last update, with review keywords now ranking sites like Reddit heavily on page 1.
  16. The site is not an actual “brand”.
  17. Google replaced the site’s top rankings with Reddit and shopping links.
  18. The content reads like it was written by AI and feels spammy.
  19. Nothing about the content is “fresh”.
  20. The audience overall favors simple answers from big media brands over in-depth geeky reviews from anonymous sites.
  21. Google only ranks big affiliate sites instead of small ones, and content doesn’t matter at all.
  22. This could be collateral damage from an overly aggressive update, or Google making space for SGE (Search Generative Experience) by making publishers think they’ve done something wrong.
  23. Google has become greedy and evil.
  24. The site may have stopped paying an advertising agency that brought them fraudulent ad traffic. The 91% traffic loss may not have been leading to conversions anyway.
  25. There may be a backlink issue, as the site was previously propped up by collaborations with visualcapitalist.com.                                                                                                                                                          Google may now be seeking a wider variety of high-quality links and references to the domain, leading to a greater presence of massive publishers.

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