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Content Forward: It's personal.
Content creation truths, weird vibes, and where do creative ideas come from?
Amy Aitman
November 22, 2024
In partnership with
Hello, fellow content peeps!
I’m back again after a busy couple of weeks. November always has an intense energy in content, and this year is no different.
I’ll give you some thoughts and catch you up, but first, a word from our sponsor…
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I don’t know how the weather has been in your part of the world, but it feels like it has rained the entire month of November here on the East Coast.
So, when we got a few hours of sunshine last weekend, I decided to catch up on my podcast listening and go for a walk. I ended up listening to an interview that has stayed with me ever since.
This interview was one of the latest Niche Pursuits podcasts, this time with Morgan McBride, a publisher previously praised and featured in Google publisher stories, then saw the HCU destroy her business. Google was even in her home the day before the HCU hit to feature them in one of their internal impact reports.
She was also one of the 20 publishers invited to Google to talk about the impact that the HCU had on their publications, businesses, and lives.
I have to applaud Morgan, who didn’t hold back her thoughts and had a lot of really smart insights as well (why don’t the Google engineers understand search?). I was literally talking out loud to myself with my headphones on throughout this interview — this, for me, is personal, too.
If you haven’t watched this interview, I think that you should.
Meghan breaks down a few things that I wanted to share:
Getting called unhelpful hurts. It’s personal.
When you are a content creator, you share some part of yourself. In blogging, many writers share their lives with us for years.
I have always marveled at how much our writers are willing to let us into their homes, and lives for their content.
Over the years, I’ve gotten to know so many of these talented writers through their work — watching them get married, have kids, buy a new home, renovate a home, make us some cocktails… they haven’t held back.
It is personal when Google, other publishers, and SEOs tell us that our content is unhelpful. Morgan explained this best:
This is content that I, things that I create with my bare hands and write about and take pictures. I don't have a team. I don't have employees. Like, this is me.
It is a complete reflection of me.
And to say that it is unhelpful means that I'm unhelpful.
And this has really kind of defined my life for the last decade and calling it unhelpful when my whole website is about helping people…
There’s been a weird vibe in the blogging community since HCU.
This bothers me, but I’m not surprised. We live in a Google-induced Feudal society, and we, the lowly peasants, are infighting.
We’ve seen this happening between SEOs and publishers, but as Morgan explained, there’s been this “weird vibe” in the blogging community as well:
When peers like other blogging this whole time with me putting out very similar content were not hit. Then it's like, wow, that makes me feel bad compared to them. And when you talk to them, they don't, understand the scope.
So they say like, Oh, you must be doing something spammy. You must be doing something weird.
Just stop whatever you're doing and you'll be fine. And so it's created this weird vibe within the community, which didn't exist before in the like blogger community in that way.
When HCU first happened (and for a while afterward), there was this narrative in the SEO community that the sites that were hit were ‘spammy.’ Over the past year, we’ve had a lot of soap-box SEOs, and other publishers talk about ‘ad density’ issues, content quality issues, and yes, continually devaluing the hard work of smaller publishers and bloggers.
I’ve felt this vibe, sure, but I’ve also been surrounded by some amazing fellow publishers who have been willing to share what they are working on to get new traffic sources too. It’s a mixed bag, but it was so comforting to hear another publisher talk about this weird vibe and call this shit out.
We’re all figuring it out—some with more grace than others—but those moments of connection and shared understanding remind me why I stick with it. It’s not just about the traffic or the rankings; it’s about the people behind the content.
Google, as a company, is very siloed.
No surprise here, this is what big orgs look like, but what surprised me was that Google really didn’t ‘read the room’ when it came to this event.
Engineers didn’t understand search, and yet they were very interested to learn more from the publishers.
Google leadership ‘held the line’ that HCU was not a site-wide penalty, despite what the publishers had said. Leadership’s advice was to ‘create helpful content’ — I can’t make this stuff up!
Speaking of Google changes, I think it’s time to ask again…
Does topical authority still matter?
This past week, Google has given out some big site reputation penalties for 3rd party content to some big publishers, to try to fix the parasite SEO practices.
Of course, there have been many discussions on ‘is this enough?’ or as Chris Long says, in this article, is this a band-aid solution for a bullet wound?
Whatever happens, the real issue is that it shouldn’t be possible for sites to ‘abuse’ their authority. Topical authority should matter, and for a long time in online publishing, it did.
I remember a time (not long ago) when we were able to create super, niche, specialized publications online and outrank the ‘big boys’ — solely because our content was better and we had topical authority on a very small subset of a topic.
But those days are gone and while Google may be trying to curb some of this abuse of domain authority from happening, this might not be enough to really fix the problem, as Lars Lofgren so thoughtfully explains in this article, The Stupidity of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy
The Real Problem: Topical Authority No Longer Matters..
It shouldn’t be possible for sites to abuse their authority in the first place…
I remember a time, in the distant past of 2019, when sites had to EARN their authority…
It’s frustrating.
The rules we used to live by in content creation—quality wins, expertise shines—don’t seem to hold up anymore. It feels like Google’s changing the game faster than we can adapt, and for smaller publishers, it’s a game we’re constantly playing on hard mode.
So, where does that leave us? If topical authority isn’t enough, what is?
The days of competing with the big players on a level playing field seem like a distant memory. But maybe it’s also a wake-up call to rethink how we approach content strategy (or where we publish our lives and talents) altogether.
The beauty of doing absolutely nothing.
Content never stops. There’s always something to do. But unlike AI, we cannot just keep creating, keep producing without some inspiration.
But, where do we find this creative inspiration from anyway?
This month, someone in my content group told me about Niksen, the Dutch concept of doing absolutely nothing, for no purpose, like staring out a window just to observe and let your thoughts go wherever they want to go.
The idea is that we’re not at our most creative when we are rushed or overproducing. It is these moments of calm and ‘nothingness’ where creative ideas can flourish.
I have to admit, this concept is tough for me. But, I’m willing to try.
I am someone who creates to-do lists for my weekends, has spreadsheets for family projects, and plans my ‘rest days’.
And yet, I like the idea of building a life with ‘nothing’ moments. It’s often why we get our best ideas in the shower, on long walks, or in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep (or is that just me?).
So, this month, I am going to try and practice this. Is this something you’d try?
You can read more about it here:
Things to Read, Watch, and Ponder
▶️ If you are thinking about pitching to speak at a conference this year, Aleyda Solis has some great advice on how to find opportunities, & win the pitch. Get some solid tips here!
▶️ Looks like there are a lot of searchers who don’t like the AI overviews in Google; now we’re getting lessons on how to disable them. Check that out here!
▶️ What can we learn about content marketing from Hunter S Thompson, Ryan Law has some thoughts on the Ahrefs blog. Read it here!
That’s it for me for tonight.
I’ll be in Portland, Oregon, for the next edition of Content Forward, but I’ll try to get something out. I’m attending the Reinvent(ed) event, where I get to meet up with some of my internet friends and make new friends in digital biz.
This year, more than ever, it’s been my biz friends that have gotten me through. If you’re in the area or want to fly out to meet up IRL, I would love it!
I don’t often hop on a plane (or three!) and fly across two countries, but I have a feeling this will be a really special event.
Cheers! Amy
If you want to get into the weeds on these topics, here are some newsletters that I read regularly that I think you’ll enjoy:
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