From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).