[FilterJoe]

I'm one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post.

I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.

Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.

Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.

[smacktoward]

I've had the opposite experience with my blog; as I've increased the amount of original research and writing in my posts, I've seen traffic steadily decline over roughly the same period.

The conventional wisdom with blogs has always been that the way to success is more frequent short posts rather than less frequent long ones, and that still seems to be the case. I don't really care much, since I don't run ads and my goal for my blog has never been to capture a large audience anyway, but more readers would always feel better than less.

[FilterJoe]

Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:

heartbleed bug what you need to know

Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.

I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.

I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.

So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.

[smacktoward]

Yeah, it's the curse of the generalist. My interests are so catholic that my blog ends up being about everything, which means as far as Google is concerned it's about nothing.

[eru]

That's sounds pretty in-depth for free advice!

[beauzero]

I have had the same experience...without the longer articles and additional hours.

...I basically maintain a blog just to keep notes for myself about current things that I am working on. Each post is short and to the point. The titles are not "click bait". I figured that if I needed it someone else might as well and I am leaving it up to the search engines to figure out relevance.

...funny thing is it gets decent traffic and next to 0 on monetization. I allow Google to place ads so that the url rental is free.

Next to no traffic prior to Panda...pretty decent traffic for the topics (some are very specialized and esoteric like a specific bit of code to extract a Sales Order from Quickbooks Enterprise).

[chralieboy]

This is so encouraging to hear! I'm not much of a writer myself, but I am super happy that Google is able to translate quality into results. Keep it up!