Last week, I wrote about Barbell Medicine, a 10-year old site that’s doing everything right - and finally getting the Google traffic it deserves.

One of the comments I got on that email was:

“Lol so the moral of the story? Slug at it for 10 years starting from today? Nah no thanks. Not putting my trust in Google anymore.”"

First, I want to say - I totally get it. And agree that you shouldn’t put your trust in Google. Diversify your traffic sources!

But I also want to share an example of a site that didn’t slug at it for 10 years, seeing great success in Google right now.

This site is also doing everything right in my opinion. Will it survive future updates? Who knows. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

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The site is London Travel Planning.

The domain was registered in September, 2022. Just over a year and a half ago.

The owners are Tracy and Doug Collins, who have over 35 years of experience exploring the UK, according to the about page.

They’re obviously doing something right in Google’s eyes. Check out that traffic jump!

Why did this site take off, when most others got brutally hit? I can’t answer this with 100% certainty, but I can point out the things they do differently from most sites.

“Been there, done that”

It’s clear the authors have first-hand experience with everything they write about. They’re easy to trust because they’ve “been there and done that”.

Many travel site owners (and niche site owners in general) publish articles about things they have no first-hand experience with.

Human-written content, original photos

I checked for AI content on several articles using Originality, and the results came back as human-written.

I also searched a bunch of the photos on the site with Google Image search, and London Travel Planning always came up as the original source. While they could easily use stock photos for many of the places they talk about in London, it appears they always use their own photos.

Podcast

Tracy has a highly-rated UK travel planning podcast with thousands of listeners.

Guess what other site has a podcast? Barbell Medicine!

How many niche site owners create a podcast (and stick to it for more than a few episodes)? Probably less than 1%.

Consulting

Tracy and Doug offer hour-long itinerary planning consulations for $197. More evidence they know what they’re talking about. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of many quality signals Google picks up on.

Large Facebook Group

Tracy and Doug aren’t wholly reliant on Google. They not only have a podcast, they also have a private Facebook group with over 20,000 members:

I’ve noticed that sites with a large audience on social media tend to weather updates better than sites with no audience. This is especially true if they have a large audience on multiple different platforms.

No programmatic ads

London Travel Planning is not on any ad network from what I can tell. They do have some banner ads in the sidebar, but they’re static and were placed there manually.

Were ad-monetized sites targeted by the HCU and March Core update?

I’m not sure. There’s a debate about it though.

Many sites that ran ads were hit far worse than sites without ads, but that could be a case of “correlation doesn’t equal causation”.

Ads might not be a problem. The problem might be that most sites running ads also happened to trigger “unhelpful content” signals in other ways. But it’s awfully suspicious.

To add to the “Google targeted ad-monetized sites” argument, Tracy and Doug also own a sister site, UK Travel Planning, which saw a traffic dip after the March Core update.

Guess what?

UK Travel Planning is monetized with Mediavine ads!

And guess what else?

UK Travel Planning did all the same “right” things that London Travel Planning did! “Been there, done that”, Human-written content, and original photos. It’s associated with the same podcast and Facebook group. Tracy and Doug offer UK travel itinerary consultations. Literally the exact same approach as London Travel Planning.

The only major difference is that UK Travel Planning is plastered with ads and London Travel Planning is not.

Can we draw definitive conclusions from this? Of course not. The sample size is far too small. But it definitely raises my eyebrows.

Curious to hear your opinion on this debate.

And that is all for this email. Hope it was inspiring or enlightening in some way!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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