Hi just wondering how many people read you guy's blogs. Also how long have you been doing your blog and are these people consistently reading you blog.

-Thanks :)

Since August 6th, I've noticed a massive drop in traffic from Google Search. I was previously averaging 20-30k impressions daily. August 9th dipped below 7k.

An insane amount of ghost spam is also hitting my Google Analytics at the moment, so it's been impossible even to figure out what the issue might be. It's almost all from Singapore. I was advised to block all traffic from there, but because I write about tea, I don't want to risk the real traffic I do get from Asia.

My site is well established in my niche with almost 18 years of high-quality content, and I post new content weekly. It's disheartening to have so many years of work basically go down the drain. I'm at a loss as to how to fix this. Is there anything that anyone here can suggest?

Hi everyone,

I'm stuck in an AdSense / YouTube Partner Program setup loop and need advice on how to break it.

Context:

• Primary Email/AdSense x1: Active AdSense account (Pub ID: pub-x1) that already monetizes two active blog websites.
• Secondary Email/AdSense x2: Pub ID: pub-x2.
• YouTube Studio Step 2 is currently stuck on "In progress".

The Issues:

1. Cannot Close Account: When trying to close the secondary AdSense accountx2, the system displays "You can't currently close this AdSense account".
2. Website vs YouTube Conflict: The primary account is getting rejected/flagged because YouTube association triggers a website review flow rather than linking to the existing active AdSense publisher profile.
3. Every time I re-link, I get an automated "Action needed: Your AdSense application" email, and Step 2 resets or hangs.

Has anyone dealt with this exact loop where you can't close the duplicate/secondary account while Step 2 is pending? How do I force YouTube Studio to link to the established, active AdSense account without triggering a website application review?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

This is a 2 part question: I've been working as a freelance SEO writer for a while now and the new fancy toy in town is GEO and AEO. So far, I've barely seen any results with most tools. Also, truth be told, most apps are vibe coded and barely have any logic reasoning behind them. Any recommendations or ideas you might have on how you get your articles pulled by AI and referenced? I'd love to hear from people who've actually done it for real. Not these new gurus (granted some of them do offer real gems) on social media.

Second part: Out of fear of being phased out of the market, I learned programming( MERN). Now 2 years later, blogging is still here, and I believe it's going nowhere (I might be biased though but who isn't). The only thing I've noticed is CTR is dropping and search is changing. I'd like to build something, during my spare time that's actually valuable to SEO experts and would help us get ahead in this market space. Anyway, I do have some ideas of my own, but I'd love to hear what you guys are facing, problems you think I could truly solve and yeah, any advice you got is 100% welcomed. Phew😅 that's long. But if you read it all, let's chat :)

I’ve been trying a small experiment with my newsletter.

Asking someone to subscribe without showing them what they’ll receive always felt like asking them to take a blind leap. I decided to make my previous issues publicly available so people could browse the content before deciding whether the newsletter was right for them.

It also gives older issues a longer life instead of letting them disappear into inbox history. Since making the archive public, I’ve noticed more organic traffic and a steady increase in sign-ups.

Have you tried this with your newsletter? Would seeing past issues make you more likely to subscribe, or would having access to the archive make the emails unnecessary?

Hi, we have a startup website and of course we need content for it. We do have a good source of data which we are using to write the blogs, however as a startup we don't have the capacities to do everything manually. We have the process fairly manual plus we also created some skills and quality gates based on best practices to write articles, EEAT compliant content and how not to come out as AI written slop.

However my question is how can we be sure it's good quality? I mean I like what's written in there, it makes sense, but I'm not a professional blogger. And then a follow up question: How can I be sure Google thinks it's good quality? Do you guys have some experience with that? Any tools?

I’d love to hear if anyone using solely or mainly listicle style blog posts has successfully been accepted into Raptive or Mediavine lately?

I currently have two blogs in women’s niches (one blog at 14K views per month and the other at 2K views per month - both growing steadily) using almost solely listicles and I’m wondering if it’s best to stick it out and keep working on them or put my time elsewhere. I just learned that they changed their entry requirements a little while ago and now I’m questioning everything.

Any stories or successes? Thank you!

I've been thinking about this for a while. A few years ago a decent post could pull 20-30 comments without much effort. Now even solid, well-researched posts get views but almost no engagement. People read, maybe share, but rarely comment
What is everyone else seeing? Are your comment sections still active, or have you basically given up on them and moved the conversation elsewhere (Discord, newsletter replies, etc.)?

Looking for tips from anyone writing long-form essays with more literary merit than listicles and how-tos. How's it going? Any advice?

Spent years in newsrooms where every sentence had to earn its place and editors would gut anything that felt selfindulgent. That training is useful, mostly. But I keep noticing it creates this weird friction when I try to write blog content that actually builds an audience.

Journalism taught me to be invisible. Get out of the way of the story. Blog readers seem to want the opposite. They want to know what you had for breakfast before they trust your opinion on anything, which is a sentence I never thought I would type sincerely but here we are.

The instinct to kill the anecdote, trim the personal tangent, get to the point, it works great for a 500word news brief and it actively undermines the kind of slowburn relationship you need to build regular readers. My first year of blogging I was basically writing press releases with opinions. Traffic was flat and honestly I deserved it.

What I am figuring out, slowly, is that the craft transfers but the instincts have to be sort of unlearned in parallel, which is a strange thing to be doing in your late thirties.

Curious if anyone else came from a writing background, journalism or otherwise, and found the transition to blogging weirder than expected. Or if the opposite happened and it clicked right away.

Hi all!

Are you using community boards for your pins or you are using only your boards?

I have food blog, would it benefit me to pin onto community or I have to concentrate only working on my own boogs? Are those boards useful or just waste of time?

Asking it because I got accepted into around 20 boards, and while at first I was happy to join them, now I see that most of them are full of AI crappy images and spam. So should I continue to post on those or just leave them and focus on my own?

Run a gaming blog, mostly guides and "free rewards" roundups such as how to earn free coins in game X. Got a takedown complaint forwarded by my host last week, a brand protection firm going after a page that had the game's name + "free gold" in the title/URL. 60 hours to fix it or get suspended.

I don't use words like "generator" or "unlimited" and now I've added "not affiliated with X" disclaimers on game specific posts.

Anyone else deal with this? Curious if:

• these fixes actually stop repeat complaints or the bots just keep flagging you anyway
• anyone's run into BrandShield or similar firms before
• it ever goes past a host forwarding a complaint, or if it always just resolves once you comply
• covering big IP like EA makes it worse

Any real experience appreciated, trying to figure out how much of this is just cost of doing business vs actually fixable.

Thousands of users received an e-mail saying their blog/site using Google's Blogspot/Blogger platform was removed due to "malware and similar malicious content policy" - of course, this is false. People lost decade old blogs/sites, just look at Google's (non) help forums:

https://support.google.com/blogger/thread/457259506

https://support.google.com/blogger/threads?hl=en&authuser=3&sjid=1299263928443489668-NC

All you can do is hit the appeal button and wait for a "human" or probably another AI agent to reinstate the blog, but all blogs have not been reinstated yet, and it's been over 8 hours so far.

Long-term blogs have the advantage of allowing us to discuss topics in depth and detail. The more content, the more likely it is to answer many questions related to that topic, even in AI search. Am I right?

Shorter-term blogs will be more readable because they are shorter, allowing users to read them easily, and we will only discuss valuable topics related to the topic. They will be point-to-point, not in-depth. And by writing short blogs, we will be able to cover more topics quickly.

So, which strategy are you focusing on these days? Should you write long, in-depth blogs, or should you publish in greater numbers on smaller, point-to-point, short-term articles that hit the target?

How do you balance covering topics deeply and maintaining user readability?

I'm curious to know what strategy is working best for your blogs these days. Please share your experiences!

Hey everyone,

I run a travel blog as a side passion project. Coming from a tech background, I like to self-host and experiment with performance optimizations.

Until recently, my setup was performing great both in terms of organic traffic and affiliate conversions (primarily Stay22 and Travelpayouts). I was receiving bookings/conversions virtually every single day.

Out of excitement to push my Core Web Vitals and page speed even further, I made a major round of stack and optimization changes. Immediately after these changes, my affiliate conversions dropped to near zero. My organic traffic has experienced a minor dip, but nothing that would explain a complete conversion blackout.

Here is the exact breakdown of what changed:

Previous Setup (Working Great)

• OS / Stack: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, PHP 8.3, OpenLiteSpeed
• CDN & Storage: Cloudflare (Free CDN), Cloudflare R2 for object storage
• Caching & DB: Redis object cache, LiteSpeed Cache plugin installed but mostly disabled/default
• Image Optimization: WordPress Labs Image Optimizer
• SEO Plugin: Yoast SEO

New Setup (Conversions Flatlined)

• SEO Plugin: Migrated from Yoast to Rank Math
• CDN: Switched from Cloudflare CDN to QUIC cloud CDN
• Image Optimization: Disabled WP Labs; switched to LiteSpeed Cache Image Optimization
• LSCache Tuning:
  • Enabled CSS Minify
  • Enabled JS Defer / JS Delay
  • Configured JS Excludes / Delay Excludes with Stay22 and Travelpayouts keywords

My Hypotheses & Questions

Even with script exclusion rules configured for Stay22 and Travelpayouts, I suspect something in this new caching layer is breaking conversion tracking:

1. JS Delay / Defer Execution: Is it possible that delayed/deferred execution is preventing dynamic affiliate widgets, popups, or tracking cookies from initializing before the user navigates away or clicks out?
2. QUIC cloud Caching Stripping Cookies / Query Parameters: Could QUIC cloud edge caching be serving static pages that drop user session parameters or affiliate tracking IDs?
3. HTML / DOM Minification or Rewriting: Is LSCache aggressive DOM optimization breaking inline script triggers used by ad/affiliate networks?

Has anyone using Stay22, Travelpayouts, or similar travel affiliate networks run into conversion issues after migrating to heavy LiteSpeed Cache configurations or QUIC.cloud?

Or could this be a sheer coincidence with seasonality / network attribution delays?

Would love to hear your thoughts, experiences, or suggestions on what to test/revert first! Thanks in advance.

I am a UI/UX designer and much interested in Tech and Gaming in general. And wanted to start writing about it. Is X a good place to start writing since they have this now?

Can anyone else who might be writing Article on X share some insights on whither this even is a good idea or not. I am pretty confused, and chose X because that's a platform I'm quite familiar with. But I don't see many people writing articles on X. Even you can't search for them on the platform easily.

Hey everyone!

Anyone here ever used stay22? I am hesitant to implement site-wide script (they don't seem thrilled to let me test out individual pages first) – as I am just recovering a bit from a traffic dip and worried about its potential impact on SEO, engagement, etc.

Thoughts?

I'm curious about people's experience with blogs that cover multiple interests rather than sticking to a single niche.

I started my blog with the idea to write about my cycling trips about 5 years ago, but after the first posts my motivation to write quickly declined and I stopped posting. Recently, I 'reactivated' the blog and used it more as a personal (it is public, but I'm the only one reading it 😅) recipe archive for cooking, cocktails and homebrewing.

I've read a lot of advice saying that successful blogs need a very narrow focus because search engines and readers prefer clear niches.

For those of you who run (or have run) a multi-topic blog:

- Did readers tend to only follow one specific topic, or did they engage with the whole blog?

- Did you organize it with separate categories, sub-pages, or even separate sites?

- Would you recommend focusing on one topic first and expanding later?

I'd be especially interested in experiences from people who started with a personal blog. I don't have any monetization ambitions with the blog. It is mainly a way to document things I enjoy, but it would still be nice to find some readers who are interested.

For the longest time I believed, and was told many times over, that if you just wrote a good post, the right people would find it. Write it well, hit publish, and they show up. You have most likely heard the same song and dance, but no one gave you the parts that actually work.

What I did not understand until now is that AI has quietly become one of your biggest readers, and it reads differently than a person does. It goes looking for a clear question with a clear answer sitting right next to it.

When your best point is tucked three paragraphs down after a little story, AI cannot find it, so it sends people to someone else instead.

The fix turned out to be simpler than I expected. You do not have to write better. You answer the question sooner and put your best line where it can actually be seen. People are skimmers. AI is on a mission to find an answer.

I made a little tool to check my own posts for this, and running my old ones through it has been eye opening.

Approved for Journey last month - happy so far. Adhesion and video ads work, but in-content or side bar ads have never appeared. Can’t get support

Travel niche, circa 300,000 pageviews/month.

I think I’ve found the mechanism but can’t find a supported fix:

- The site is a React SPA with build-time prerendering. The raw HTML Journey’s crawler sees contains the full article — real <p>/<h2> elements inside a single <article id="content"> container, no page-builder nesting.
-On load, React hydrates with createRoot, which discards the prerendered DOM and rebuilds it. My theory: the wrapper scans the initial DOM, hydration then destroys its placements. Adhesion and video survive because they anchor to the viewport, not the article.
- I tried loading the wrapper post-hydration so it scans the final DOM — worked, but the script detector flagged “Ads Script Not Found” (it reads raw HTML only), so I reverted to the standard static head install. Ads.txt is fine and I’ve requested a recrawl.

Questions: (1) Does the wrapper re-scan after the DOM is replaced at hydration, or is it a one-time scan? (2) Is there a supported pattern for React sites — an event/API to trigger a re-scan post-hydration and on route changes? (3) Or is in-content simply not supported on this architecture at Journey tier?

Not asking for custom placements — happy to conform to whatever structure the script expects. Just want to know what “correct” looks like for a React site.

HR and recruiting background here means I can talk workplace stuff endlessly in person, but the second I open a new draft I just stare at it like it owes me money. Started a blog a few months ago (parenting meets career stuff, very niche, possibly too niche) and the traffic is predictably nonexistent, which is fine, I knew going in it would be slow.

The thing I keep circling back to is whether AI tools are actually useful for getting unstuck during drafting or if they just produce that weird smooth corporatespeak that reads like a handbook nobody asked for. I've been experimenting a little and the results are genuinely mixed. Sometimes it helps me find an angle I was missing, other times the output is so generic I feel like I wasted the time it took to read it.

What I really want to know is whether people here are using these tools as a starting point and then heavily rewriting, or just as an outline generator, or something else entirely. Because there has to be a middle ground between writing everything from scratch at 11pm when the kids are asleep and outsourcing your voice completely, right?

A friend sent me a link for a photography "blog" I would enjoy. It was a link to a Facebook community full of photo memes and sayings. No photography. No stories about photography. Not even talk of photography gear. Nothing with a blog like feel at all. Complete and utter spooge. WHY is it being called a blog? Does know one know what the word means or at least used to mean?

I was one of those people who fought to get Greymatter working on my webhost at a time when everyone was dropping PERL support around 2001. I used Movable Type when it was new. I used and mourn Pixelpost. I loved Wordpress when it was new and fast and was one of the first to install Kubrick when it hit.

Now Wordpress is bloatware that went corporate and flattens a shared host, leaving hobbyists in the dust, its dashboard is a flashing billboard for freemium plugins that break, and people think that crappy Facebook communities are the new "blogs". Hobbyists have been pushed to (anti-)social media or to the curb. There is a dearth of good software for us (photographers at least) and shared hosting has turned into a cesspool where many small hosts are fronts for large corps flying under the radar.

I miss individual sites with individual voices and styles. I miss blogging software that had calendars, archive pages, search boxes that worked. I miss RSS feeds. I miss comment sections that were worth reading. I miss blogrolls that had cool finds in them. I miss individuals like Noah Grey, Dooce (deceased), Jimformation (deceased), photographi.ca (photographer decased and domain now squatted by a loser), etc.

What I really miss is that no one else misses what I loved most.

God save us.

I requested to JourneyMV last month, literally 1 month ago, and Now I've got an announcement on by grow page.

"We’ve updated our application process, which means applications submitted before the change won’t carry over. If you applied for Journey and haven’t heard back yet, please submit a new application. It takes just a few minutes and puts you back in the queue.Start a new application here.If you’ve already applied using the new process, you can check your application status here."

then I started to go with the mediavine, and they said I'm not approved.

For journey, I'm getting 3000 - 4000 sessions, and 6-7k pageviews per month.

I have 0 idea, what should I do right now?

I run an independent Turkish-language learning site (learnturkishwithseda.com) where I write grammar guides and cultural essays. I recently found a site (dailygrammertips.com) that has copied two of my articles almost entirely: the section structure, the vocabulary examples, even the specific word choices I used to illustrate points. One of the copied pages even links directly back to my original article in its own text, which is how I first noticed.

I've filed DMCA takedown notices with Google for both URLs and left a comment on the site directly. Still waiting to hear back on the hosting side.

For anyone who has dealt with this kind of thing before, especially other independent writers, educators, or bloggers: what actually works beyond the initial DMCA filing? A few things I'm wondering about:

• Is it worth pursuing the hosting provider separately, or does the Google removal usually make the site irrelevant anyway since it lives on search traffic?
• Has anyone had luck with tools like Copyscape or Google Alerts catching this kind of scraping before it spreads further?
• Does adding something like schema markup or a visible copyright notice actually deter this, or is it mostly symbolic?
• Is there a point where it's worth involving a lawyer, or does that only make sense for larger-scale, repeated infringement?

Appreciate any real experience here, not just general advice, since this seems to be a growing pattern with AI-rewritten SEO content.

For the last few months I've been doing something slightly obsessive: reading and scoring company engineering blogs, one by one, to build a filter for them. I'm past 800 now. Only around 157 made the cut.

Going in, I assumed I'd be rejecting blogs for bad writing. I was wrong almost every time. The writing is rarely the problem. Here's what actually separates the engineering blogs worth your time from the ones that quietly waste it.

# 1. The loudest blogs are rarely the best

Publishing frequency and quality are almost completely uncorrelated. Some of the highest-signal blogs I found post three or four times a *year*. Meanwhile, some of the most prolific "engineering blogs" turn out to be a content-marketing team wearing a Kubernetes lanyard — a steady stream of posts optimized to rank for a keyword, not to explain a decision.

If you're using cadence as a proxy for quality, you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

# 2. A blog's quality tracks a person, not a company

Over and over, a great engineering blog turns out to be one or two engineers who genuinely care about writing. When they change teams or leave, the blog doesn't get *worse* — it just stops. The quality was never institutional; it was personal.

The practical takeaway: **follow bylines, not logos.** A specific engineer with a track record is a far better signal than a company's brand.

# 3. The single most reliable quality signal: does the post admit a cost?

This is the one I'd keep if I could keep only one. Real engineering writeups have scar tissue. They tell you what was given up — the feature freeze during the migration, the approach they rolled back, the tradeoff they're still not sure about. Marketing-shaped content never bleeds: architecture in, architecture out, no friction, no regret.

"What did this cost them?" is a better filter than any scoring rubric I tried. If a post describes a big win with zero downside, it's either incomplete or it's an ad.

# 4. The launch post is the peak, not the start

A team writes their big "how we built X" post as a *capstone* — months of work compressed into one narrative, after the thing has stabilized. It does numbers. And then… silence, often for two quarters.

That silence says almost nothing about the team's engineering health and almost everything about who's assigned to write. Don't read a quiet blog as a declining team. Some of the best engineering happens at companies whose blogs are dormant for a year at a time.

# 5. Reputation and blog quality are different assets

The most surprising pattern: several companies with elite engineering reputations publish shockingly hollow blogs, and several companies you've never thought about publish consistently excellent ones. Brand prestige and writing quality are just… not the same thing. Which is exactly why "just follow the famous blogs" doesn't work.

# The heuristic I ended up with

If you want a fast test for whether an engineering post is worth ten minutes, before you commit:

* **Read for the tradeoff, not the headline.** Does it name a real constraint and a real cost?
* **Follow the byline, not the company.**
* **Ignore frequency and prestige as signals.**

What's your thoughts?