Is Google Trying To Erase Santa? The Curious Case Of EmailSanta.com - Search Engine Journal

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This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Alan in Calgary, Alberta, who wrote:

“I created EmailSanta.com in 1997. I’ve been an avid follower of SEJ and with your help, have been rewarded with #1 positions for very competitive keywords using only white hat methods.

(I even once – briefly – beat out Google and NORAD.)

However, the site’s ranking and organic traffic has been falling hard these past two years. The drop possibly happened in March 2019, according to GA, but seasonality can make inflection points difficult to pinpoint.

There was a core update then but I haven’t been able to figure out what the update was and how it would’ve affected my site.

Despite my best efforts and 24 years of SEO experience (as an ‘enthusiast,’ not a professional), I cannot stem the drop.

There has never been any black hat (no need for it). Technical SEO is decent, although not perfect. Hopefully E-A-T is decent as we have multiple links from Wikipedia, NYT, etc. since 1997.”

Alan went on to share a few theories about what he thinks may be happening, including:

• The site is a Christmas portal (>100 pages) and portals went out a long time ago. He wondered if he would do better by breaking the site up into components.
• He noted that it seems as though Google’s AI has...

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