I long ago gave up on the idea of making any money from this blog. I inherently dislike advertisements anyway, and this site has never had enough traffic to make it worth compromising a clean interface to enable something like Google Adsense in order to make a couple hundred bucks per year. I’ve posted a few referral links over the years to credit cards and products that I actually use and those were a bust.
Not caring about monetization in itself is nice, because I only post here when I have something to say. But I’m also posting on the internet for the potential of other people discovering and reading what I’ve written — otherwise I’d just keep it offline on my local machine.
As many people know Google is the largest driver of internet traffic by far. For many people, it is their primary gateway to discovering content around the web. Google regularly updates their proprietary search engine algorithm, tweaking different hidden factors to change what content is displayed to searchers. And over the past couple of years these changes have decimated organic search traffic to Frugal Flannel.
Heck, look what happens when I Google the name of my own darn blog:
The top 3 results are:
- Reddit, possibly influenced by searchers increasingly appending “reddit” to searches in a bid to find discussion between real humans in a sea of GPT-generated SEO spam. Also possibly influenced by the $60M per year Google is paying Reddit to use their data for AI training, which gives them a vested interest in getting more people using Reddit.
- A user of the free WordPress blog service that also named their blog Frugal Flannel. They started their blog after I did, and have not posted a single thing in over four years. But they get to hitchhike on WordPress.com’s domain authority.
- Google overriding my autonomy and thinking they know better what I mean to search for than what I typed, decides the best match for my query is “cheap flannel shirts” on Amazon.
I click through many more pages of links to flannel shirts, and my blog is nowhere to be found. Okay, maybe Amazon and Reddit have more domain authority than I do. But a defunct blog on the free subdomain of WordPress, that couldn’t have gotten www.frugalflannel.com if they wanted to pay for a dedicated domain, because I had it registered when they started their blog?
Going back to Google’s algorithm updates, here’s how traffic referred to this site from Google has changed over the years, as reported in Jetpack:
| Year | Clicks referred from Google Search |
| 2019 (site launched in July) | 14 |
| 2020 | 142 |
| 2021 | 539 |
| 2022 | 1,020 |
| 2023 | 620 |
| 2024 (YTD) | 30 |
- I add novel and interesting content to my website over time, which increases the amount of total information on my site and the chances it will collide with a search someone is performing.
- My domain stays registered for years, which should increase my domain authority.
- I try to create high quality content that people will find useful. My click-through rate (CTR) averages around 2%, which means for every 100 people seeing my website in a search result, 2 of them clicked it. As far as I can tell this is a decent CTR for a blog. Some of my articles had CTRs of 10% or even 20% and used to rank on the first page of Google.
Did I violate some policy and offend the overlords at Google? Not as far as I can tell. My content is tame and on-topic. Everything I write is original and written by me (or otherwise properly cited), nothing I write about is illegal, and I don’t think I’ve even used profanity anywhere on this site.
I even use the Google Search Console tool (and have for years), which allows webmasters to upload a sitemap to make it easier for Google to crawl their sites, as well as shows what pages are appearing in search for specific terms and how many clicks they have generated. The graph it presents shows a steady decay since early 2023 in the number of users being shown any content from Frugal Flannel in search results, and although my CTR remained about the same this obviously leads to less total clicks.
At least Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Baidu still like me. But combined, they’re a fraction of the organic search traffic that Google is capable of generating. When one runs afoul of Google — or, more accurately, runs afoul of its algorithms — clicks to their website can evaporate overnight, and they may have no idea why, or what they can do to get back in its good graces. I’m glad that I’m not making a living off online content, each and every day relying on Google’s continued benevolence.
Dear Mr. Sundar Pichai, would I get off the naughty list if I enable Google AdSense on my site?