Dear Google algorithm,

I’m sorry, love.

I get so lost sometimes.Days pass, and this emptiness in organic traffic fills my heart.

I remember the days that the “Fantasy Nation Name Generator” got nearly 300-400 hits a day, and people loved checking out the “Worldbuilding: 36 Types of Government” two-part article.

My weird strain of geek, focused on the speculative fiction writing, fantasy world-building, and table-top gaming world, was just the thing that stirred your heart. It was niche. It was the kind of thing people looking to expand their toolkit in making speculative fiction worlds loved. The keywords were straight and to the point. It was on a journey of its own efficacy; its own self-discovery, and it was a spark of light in the darkness.

And then… I discovered it wasn’t true.

It was like a blow to my heart. The very pit of my soul. What I thought was organic was not. I was beset,… by Toxic backlinks!

Okay. Setting aside the dramatic presentation, for those of you out there who have better things to do with your time than learn the ins-and-outs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how Google ranks things, lets do some quick glossary ad-lib.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a series of stuff you do to a website so that search engines (but honestly, Google) are more willing to rank it higher in results. Fact is, 71.33% of Google users choose items that are on the first page of their search. Granted, they likely already know what they’re searching for, but finding yourself on the top of the list for certain keywords is key to website success.

Ranking well depends on making sure relevant keywords are properly represented, and in a way that Google does not detect as “spammy”.

However, one big factor is how your site shows up in the “web” of hyperlinks throughout the internet. Are other sites linking to you? Are those sites reliable, relevant, and not “spammy”? Is that web enabling organic traffic, and optimizing the usability of Google to users in the long run?

Backlinks are links to your site from external places. This is one of the bigger factors nowadays that helps you rank well. There are ways to grow your backlink profile organically by linking social media, forum posts (signatures), platform blogs, and through another person posting your link somewhere. There are sneakier ways to do it too, which… really is just trolling the internet for places with decent DR rating, and finding a way to get your link up there. … I’m not one for dishonesty, tbh. Honestly. But there are a ton of harmless ways to get those backlinks, like signing up accounts with websites that offer link-pages, portfolio pages, repositories, etc.

Also, there are a couple tools to get a look at your backlink profile:

However,… beware. The moment your site is up, hundreds of bots, bad actors, black hats, and others may find opportunity to link to your site from not-well-ranking places in order to try and game an algorithm. … This brings down your DR.

Nowadays, Google is good at identifying toxic backlinks like these. However, some people still suggest going the route of Disavowing these toxic backlinks. Google provides a way to do so, though its a ham-fisted solution to be used carefully or not at all.

This will likely go away at some point.

In short…. nobody tells you these things.

… not unless you pay a marketing or SEO specialist, have the insight to look it up yourself, or just so manage to have an SEO-savvy friend who tips you off to it (my lucky case)!

So, early in my journey, I decided to ham-fist my way through this, use AHREF to get a list of backlinks, figure out the toxic ones, and attempt to disavow them.

… To this day, 6 months later, I can’t say its done anything.

According to Google, disavowing takes a wopping 60-90 days!!!

… but beyond that, its been more like 180, and I still see toxic ones on my sites profile.

Its only later I’m informed that it isn’t important to do this; its an outdated way to handle toxic backlinks, and google is at least “better” at not letting them affect you negatively. Unsure the fact or fiction behind that, as the highest ranking sites are also BIG businesses. Money as an unfair advantage makes the believability somewhat harder.

ANOTHER thing is your sitemap, which I royally messed up by putting all of my random name generators from /resources/ to /random-name-generators/ .

Thing is, sometimes you have to change things on your site. Stuff needs to be moved around; things need labeling, or tags, or categories, and some CMS’s have a funny way of insisting that this changes the overall URL of those pages.

Unfortunately, this made the Google algorithm freak out, realizing that popular pages weren’t going to the same URL anymore. I rushed to add on a forwarding so that these links would go to the new URL, and I submitted a fresh XML Sitemap to Google, but the damage was done.

Granted, while this is a harsh lesson in site management, its not an expensive lesson. I was able to get things back to normal in a couple months, and… well.., the site doesnt sell anything. It has a few non-invasive ads, but thats about it.

Anyhow, this is me sharing my journey juggling with the external SEO side of site management. Its a whole specialization,… and a mess. But the views are coming in, and I learned how to improve my ability to get organic traffic coming into the site,…. despite the fact that doing so is like a whole second job.

Aye-yei-yei!