Just like us, if you’re wondering where did you lose all the google web stories traffic . You did everything right followed every rule, followed every guideline, your stories weren’t exactly copy-paste or auto-generated presentations and lastly, you did not steal anyone’s work just like that, then you have all the right to ponder and be a little sad about your lost traffic.
4 main reasons why you lost web stories traffic.
Read on to know more. Tell us in comments if you made such mistakes. If you followed every rule and still lost your traffic, then read the whole article, we have a very likely reason for that too.
You used copyrighted images without giving proper credit to the owner.
When you start getting loads of traffic after posting interesting, trending web stories, it’s very easy to give in to use any image that you find on google. If you’re not a big team, or a company and working as an individual, then in haste to post 3-4 stories a day, you may actually end up using images that require due credit to be given. Lack of credits can be taken as one of the violations.
You copy-pasted content from someone’s blog article as is.
Many over-excited blogging YouTubers started spreading wrong guidelines which involved simply finding the most trending article and copy-pasting it into the web stories to churn out multiple web stories in a day, very quickly. Google’s algorithm update did handle this later and penalized such web story publishers who saw their traffic go down to zero immediately after that.
You put too many links and make your web stories into hooks to get traffic to other web pages.
This came to light more recently when there were many web story publishers violating this particular rule in abundance. This is a trick for getting traffic to all the different web pages of your article. Considered a hook to get traffic onto other pages of your website and get more page views and more AdSense earnings. The other way people mostly used this trick was to send traffic to pages that contained affiliate links or include affiliate links inside the web stories themselves. What google wants you to do is publish articles that give out the whole story. If you’re practicing this trick where you just give out a small overview of the article and ask the users to click to read more, then it’s likely that you’ve already lost your traffic or you’ll lose your traffic very soon.
Your web stories have a very high load time.
Google insists a lot on low load time for a better user experience. Now you must be wondering why is this affecting web stories when these are AMP-based presentations. We assume here that a majority of web story publishers are using WordPress. That means, they can publish web stories only by using the very few plugins that are available. What happens when these plugins weave their magic to help you create RICH visual presentations called web stories? These plugins use loads of CSS and Javascript. These in the first place take a lot of time to load. Thus LCP (largest contentful paint) of your web stories always remains HIGH. This especially happens when you embed too many google fonts, too many animations, and high-resolution retina images. All these elements in the web stories increase the load time. Most of the web story publishers use shared servers. The TTFB on shared servers is by default very high and you practically can’t do anything about it. On top of that, the default load time of the web stories is on the higher side. Add these up and you get an LCP of 3.2 to 3.5s. The page insights tool recommended by google will always tell you this LCP is very high.
Tip: To improve the LCP of web stories, try these:
- Do not use large images. Image size should be restricted below 40KB for best results.
- Do not use too many different types of font. Stick to one font and use it throughout. Even using a bold or italics version could add a new embed code for a google font variant resulting in higher load time, and higher LCP.
- Do not use unnecessary animations. Using animation even on 1 screen will result in the embedding of an extra javascript, increasing an HTTP request and thus the load time and LCP.
- Do not use too many GIFS, or too many assets are provided in the library of web stories app. They all add up to the load time.
Now, let’s take a case where you have followed every rule and your LCP has been below 2.5 in the green zone on page insight, but still lost your traffic. What could be the reason?
We have carried out a lot of research on web stories, especially from different accounts and devices. We noticed that most of the web stories shown to us were published by big companies like India Today, Pink Villa, Hindustan Times, India Today, and all the big names. Not a single web story came to our notice that was from an unknown company. Do you get an idea? This means google is giving preference to the big players only. If you’re an individual, an unknown new blog owner, or an unknown company, it’s very likely that you’ll never receive your traffic back. This however is our researched observation. You should look into it on your own from your own perspective too. And, this issue is something we or many experts may not know how to solve.
So, think twice if you decide to continue posting web stories despite 0 traffic, in the hope of getting it back and running some day. It might just not work.
Check Out Our Web Stories Here.
