Cheapest Destinations Blog

Some of you have been reading this Cheapest Destinations Blog for a long time, but a whole other set of readers land here for the first time after I show up in some search query or another. Google, also known as Big Brother of the Internet, released a major update last month that did something different and rather sinister: it penalized entire sites for having some posts that were deemed “thin content” or “not helpful.” 

As I pared down more and more, I got to half of that number and now I’m below 800. Most of them that I’m getting rid of now are not terrible or outdated, they’re just too short, relics from the days when a blog post could be a few paragraphs long.

Now we can’t just spout off on a subject or answer a question succinctly. If we do that, the post won’t get ranked in search unless it’s on a big brand site that’s spending lots of ad money and has a high “domain authority.” Our posts from independent bloggers, not e-commerce sites or media empires, have to be deemed “comprehensive” or they wither and die in obscurity. We have to have triple the expertise and double the authority to reach the ad-filled first page of Google at the bottom. 

This is insider info on how search works that you the reader don’t really need to care about unless you’re frustrated by all the high-ranked articles in search that don’t really answer your question. Or they do get to the point you came for eventually, but you have to scroll through 2,000 words to get what you came looking for. Really it’s not the publisher’s fault: they’re just doing what Google has trained them to do.