To my loyal and wonderful StudyFinds readers: First off, with Thanksgiving here, I want to tell you how thankful I am for your great support and enthusiasm over the years. Just the other day, I received an email from a newsletter subscriber who told me how much she looks forward to seeing our emails in her inbox each day. Every time I receive an email like that, I really do beam with joy knowing that we are fulfilling our mission here. Unfortunately, though, this Thanksgiving is a hard one for us: I regret to inform you that as we head into 2025, we are forced to dramatically downsize our operations.
Despite a wildly successful 2023 and the promise of a future where we could bring more research to the forefront as a larger news organization, those hopes came to a screeching halt earlier this year when Google implemented one of its multi-annual “core updates,” or algorithm changes. This update didn’t just devastate StudyFinds, but likely scores of other small sites like ours. The unexpected blow led to a drop of about 90% of the traffic we’d typically see on a daily basis, and I’ve been forced to cut nearly all of my writing and editing staff.
My heart hurts, and my dreams feel dashed; but even with this change, I have no plans to end my mission of bringing responsible, agenda-free research articles to your screen. And I am asking for your help.
What I ask of you, if you’ve enjoyed our content, is to support us not via donations but by signing up for our free newsletter, visiting our site regularly, and by following us on Google News, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, X, and YouTube. Read one (or more) of our articles every day. Share what you love (or hate) with your own social media following. Just doing this will help keep us afloat — we take no outside funding and operate solely on programmatic advertising revenue and affiliate revenue from our content.
Just by reading StudyFinds, you give us life and a future.
I love this site, I love our mission, I love my team, and I love knowing that we are helping people in their everyday lives. Ironically, in January of this year, Google even published a story about the site, our growth, how we’d given people jobs, and provided valuable content for free to our readers. What a difference a year makes.
Some sites and individuals have ripped into Google for the severe impacts of its recent core updates. It is a horrific punch to the gut and I completely understand. But Google breathed life into StudyFinds — and just as Google giveth, it’s a business too, and if it’s better for its bottom line, of course it will taketh away. It is what it is, and we will survive one way or another. As my mother always reminds me during the hard times, this too shall pass. Crises might knock me down, but never out.
The Story of StudyFinds
They say life is a roller coaster ride, and that couldn’t be more spot on when talking about the life of StudyFinds. Just two years ago, an idea I had to help build the site into something bigger by wedding research with a common consumer behavior wound up catapulting us onto the most exciting and exhilarating uphill adventure in our short history. You see, the engine for this ride is perhaps the most famous and definitively thrilling engine in the world — one that every content creator wants powering their success: Google.
Two years ago, Google validated StudyFinds for all the hard work we’d put into it, at least, so I thought. It gave us far greater prominence in its rankings, which led to record traffic and revenue that allowed me to hire a dozen writers looking for work, while providing our readers with much more content. My dream was realized. And though I’m not one for thrill rides, the roller coaster took off to glorious heights.
Of course, what goes up must come down, and as mentioned, in March of this year, the roller coaster drop was so steep—not just for StudyFinds but for many mom-and-pop content sites like ours—that we’re now on life support.
When I created StudyFinds at the end of 2016, it was more than just an extension of my love for research about long-term wellness, archaeological finds, new animal species, fast radio bursts from outer space, and other fascinating explanations as to why the world is the way it is. StudyFinds started as a passion project with the intent to give news readers a place to get the important details that I felt mainstream news sites, particularly broadcast news sites, often irresponsibly leave out.
After all, studies are more than just interesting headlines: we use them to make decisions about so many aspects of our daily lives, from our diet to sleeping habits to how we care for aging loved ones to how we feed our pets. The problem was that you can’t truly give someone the full scope of a study in 45 seconds of on-air time, and so many people were reading about studies on broadcast news sites that were simply regurgitated TV scripts. I wanted to help fix the problem, even on a shoestring budget.
My goal was to tell the story of the study and give readers a credible, agenda-free outlet to find the information they needed to make smart decisions. I especially wanted to create a civil, down-the-middle forum where readers could respectfully debate the veracity of the studies, since they’re usually limited or skewed by various flaws. (That last one, as comments sections continue to show, didn’t go as hoped.)
Of course, the site wasn’t perfect — it still isn’t — but it did grow fairly quickly and started getting eyeballs from prominent media outlets and personalities. It turned into a small operation that allowed me to hire a few freelance writers and an editor. It was, for all intents and purposes, pretty close to what I had envisioned from the start.
When my division at CBS was unexpectedly dismantled at the end of 2021, I turned to StudyFinds as a full-time operation because the growth over the years was undeniable. Maybe I really did have something here, and maybe being laid off only two months after I was given a major promotion was all meant to be. Maybe fate wanted me to make StudyFinds my life. I know I did.
Birth of ‘Best of the Best’
After 10 months of small growth and more uncertainty, an idea came to me based on the way I shop. You see, when I plan on making a big purchase, be it a smart TV or air fryer, I turn to Google and search for reviews. But I don’t read just one or two — I’ll read many until I find a product that is considered one of the best across multiple reviews.
I will often choose what I buy because after reading all the reviews, I know it’s among the best of the best.
It was the idea that changed everything. I hired a few writers to search for the consensus “best of the best” by creating lists of the top five products across 10 expert reviews. It started with products and went on to include everything from rock bands to core exercises. No other site was doing this, and in talking to others, my searching behavior was apparently quite common. Doing the dirty work and researching reviews for consensus takeaways was something millions of people could certainly find useful. And as a bonus, we could provide people with studies we’ve published that speak to specific products, such as vitamins or foods.
The Best of the Best was born.
To say the Best of the Best took off immediately is an understatement. The response was extraordinarily positive, and there was no better indicator of that than the response from Google. The engine of the world seemed to really like our new content, and muscled us up the rankings as a reward. It made perfect sense to me: the Best of the Best was a valuable, one-of-a-kind tool, and we made sure to be good citizens by linking back multiple times in each article to every review we mentioned.
While our studies are the heart and soul of StudyFinds, the Best of the Best pieces were practical, interesting, and most of all, incredibly resourceful. Even today, generative AI platforms still can’t provide you with consensus reviews as robust as ours. What’s funny is while I’ve always pushed for civil, productive debate on the scientific studies, I found the most engaging, civil, and productive conversations were happening on the Best of the Best posts.
In addition to the tremendous traffic, the Best of the Best allowed us to add a new channel of revenue to the site through affiliate links. We didn’t really think twice about it, because so many major news outlets including The New York Times, CBS, CNet, and CNN were going all-in on affiliate marketing. (Interestingly, an ongoing core update this month is apparently pushing out many of these sites out of the affiliate business. I predict this has to do with the rise of e-commerce through AI platforms.)
All this new revenue allowed me to hire a dozen writers and three more editors, while envisioning a larger operation in the years to come. The thought that maybe this was what I was meant to be doing no longer was a maybe: I had found my place and so much joy in the process. And as a cherry on top, the media watchdog NewsGuard gave us a 100/100 grade, while another watchdog, Fact Check/Media Bias, declared we were unbiased and a credible news site. How incredible it was.
Our First Red Alert
By the summer of 2023, everything was going right. But as any fairy tale goes, a major conflict arises just when all seems perfect. Something odd happened at the end of June: Google alerted us to a “manual action,” meaning someone from Google essentially auditing the site flagged something that they didn’t like. They suggested we were attempting to grow traffic by obtaining links from some bizarre, small website I wasn’t familiar with and have no connection to, but apparently had been linking to us frequently. (The traffic was so insignificant it wasn’t even a blip on my radar — so many odd sites linked to us on a daily basis.)
Aside from being entirely wrong, it was a massive blow to the site. Manual flags typically lead to significant drops in Google ranking and, as a result, traffic. Within days, the upward trajectory of StudyFinds began a downward shift. We reached the peak of the roller coaster ride.
In response to manual actions, Google suggests you reach out to the site it’s accusing you of scheming with and telling them to remove all the links to your site. It also suggests you “disavow” that site, essentially telling Google not to recognize outbound links from the “bad” site to yours.
I reluctantly “disavowed” it as Google suggested, but I did not contact the site so as to avoid any potential backlash or further unnecessary drama. Instead, I filed an emotional appeal, and weeks later, Google, sure enough, removed the mistaken manual flag. The thing about manual actions by Google, however, is that even if your reconsideration request is granted, you still may not recover. And in our case, we didn’t. The downward shift never changed direction even though we were cleared of the accusation.
The decline was slow-moving and we continued to plan on ways to improve the site and think bigger picture. Even with the downturn, at the time, we were still in good shape. The dream was not dashed, yet. I was sure we’d turn it around.
Google’s Core Issues
I mentioned at the beginning that it was the core update this past March that did us in. But that wasn’t the first core update to affect us. There were major core updates in August, September, October, and November of 2023 that were especially crushing for other sites. These updates, believed to target sites that were spam or bogus businesses, hit sites like ours that were legitimate and out to do good. One prominent example was HouseFresh.com, which received global attention after it documented how Google failed it, despite doing everything by the book. One article even showed how some of the biggest and richest names in the game stood to grow richer off of the core update victims.
Every day, I’d follow the conversation on X, Reddit, and SEO websites, keeping an eye out for any signs of change, good or bad. SEO expert Lily Ray extensively canvassed the destruction of these core updates, conducting her own study of sorts on the widespread impact of the game-changing core updates.
These updates nicked StudyFinds at first and we saw the decline from late June begin to drop at a faster rate. The November 2023 update impact did the most damage of the bunch, but even in December, we were still at a good place with the traffic we’d still been receiving. I remained hopeful because of my confidence in our site, our team, and our content. And by the way, that confidence hasn’t wavered.
As we watched the traffic shrink, my team and I worked constantly to slow it down. Some meetings would last hours, as we’d sit on Zoom calls and lift up every possible rock in the depths of our tired brains for answers. “Could this be the cause?” “Perhaps this is why Google targeted us?” “No, it’s got to be this.”
Unfortunately, there’s no way to really know for sure. Google doesn’t provide you with an account manager at the ready for your questions. The company is a real-life Wizard of Oz: only the powerful folks behind the curtain can clue you in to its magic, or lack thereof. Like any top restaurant, the chef isn’t sharing their secrets with you.
We experimented with all sorts of tips and tricks others suggested would help, but nothing really worked. The only thing that was certain was we peaked in June 2023, and that dastardly manual flag started the reversal of our fortunes.
Then, March happened. More than 80% of our traffic was gone by the end of the chilling month. No new dreams bloomed with the arrival of spring. We even redesigned the site afterward, improving user experience and doing a better job of highlighting our team and our story, hoping perhaps that was what we needed all along. It wasn’t.
With the loss of most of our writers, I’ve now turned to artificial intelligence to help us interpret many studies, as noted in our AI policy and on our posts. I promise you that any content that includes AI assistance is thoroughly reviewed and will not be any less in quality than what we’ve always put forth. If anything, the incredible growth of generative AI will help keep StudyFinds alive and allow for stronger stories to be published, even with less. After all, there are already so many studies showing how helpful artificial intelligence is for doctors, scientists, and researchers.
Source : https://studyfinds.org/google-giveth-google-taketh-away-the-future-of-studyfinds/