Did Google dropped rankings for BikeGremlin site?
In a recent post by BikeGremlin (bikegremlin.com) owner stated that their site seems to be hit with Google core update does started declining in clicks and impressions as per the GSC screenshot they posted. I suspect the Google HCU (helpful content update) hit the site and it started to tank in rankings. I could see the site was getting anywhere around 2K+ unqiue visitors (clicks) a day from Google.com search which fell beyond 60% just in one year. Now their posts do not rank even if the suffix is added as "bikegremlin". The site is about tech and bikes (cycles). I've found that after the Google March core update and AI overviews in search results the site got less and less visitors. That site has really researched and long-form articles. It might be Google now-a-days picks and ranks articles and posts which satisfy the user's search intent within first 100 or 150 words. My SEO guru friend was telling me that Google now prefers short content. For example if someone writes a recipe blog, it should display the actual instructions at the top. Gone are the days when people used to write a 1000 to 2000 word article.
I’ve gone through the bikegremlin.com website. The site has some really long articles and many articles are too short which includes just a title, small paragraph and a youtube video. Google mostly do not value youtube embeded content pages unless there is other content supporting it like descriptive writing, comments, reviews, or other editorial stuff that supplements the video. While some other pages on bikegremlin cover the topic in-depth, but now-a-days Google does not values long content, rather the information should be short. Creating new pages for every question to the topic and answering it in 100-200 words rank better from 2025 onward in google search. Earlies, table of content, long articles covering many similar topics could rank that specific page as google use to mark it as authority post.
Google core update recently had down-voted or deranked sites that write on many un-related topics like bike, technology, gardening, smartphones, etc on a single domain unless you are a big news media site. I’ve gone through bikegremlin and that site has tons of sections or topics linking each other but totally unrelated to their main niche that is biking/cycling. So Google seems to have penalized that site and it may not recover unless the offtopic articles and content are moved to new domain or made no-index, nofollow with a meta tag. Remember what happened to geeksforgeeks site. They wrote articles on top celebrities and movies which was offtopic than their original coding niche and site got hit and de-ranked.
Yeah… i quite agree with you. Visited bikegremlin and it has so many topics listed, for example, automotive, car, motorcycles, forum, bicycle, bicycle assembly, bicycle chains, bicycle cranks, bicycle fittings, bicycle tyres, tubes, helmets, bicycle handlebars, tapes, grips, brakes, riding tips, and then it has technology section which covers computer, IT, hardware, internet, security, web design, web hosting reviews, video editing tutorials, wordpress plugin, and then sailing, home and garden tips and how-to videos, and has posts on science, electricity, electronics, physics, etc.—all on one site. Surely google has penalized it and deranked the pages.