As you can probably see from the post history on this site, it’s been a while since anything has been posted to Garage Dreams.
There’s a simple reason for this.
Late last year (2023) Google decided to release an update to its search algorithm, the so-called “helpful content update”, that basically resulted in Garage Dreams disappearing from Google search.
I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but the idea behind the “HCU” was that Google wanted to demote content it perceived as being more likely to be AI-generated or otherwise unhelpful and replace it with user-generated content (which is why you often see Reddit and forums/discussion boards at the top of Google now, even if the results are outdated).
While this site is almost completely “human written” content, apart from a few bits where we have used AI to expedite content creation after doing the research, unfortunately it was still terribly impacted.
We used to get several thousand visitors a day. Now we would be lucky to get several hundred, and that would be a very good day.
As you can imagine, it’s a frustrating outcome.
Ben and I have poured literally hundreds, if not thousands of hours each into this site since its inception. Our buyer’s guides are some of the most comprehensive and well-researched around (of course that’s just our opinion) and in most instances if you search e.g. “300ZX buyer’s guide” you’ll see some ancient forum thread instead. We also researched and published hundreds of smaller articles e.g. our popular Car Facts series.
In the end, none of it matters as Google has marked our card – based on their perception of the site sharing characteristics with spam sites (e.g. lots of question and answer-based articles, certain publishing platform/theme, monetisation with ads) – and it’s unlikely this will ever be reversed.
There are two issues here:
1. Although Garage Dreams has never been a full-time income for either of us, the ad revenue we were earning from the site when it was receiving thousands of visitors a day was very helpful money for us to share. Since that has all but dried up, we’ve both had to focus more on other business/employment ventures that continue to generate a profit and so the impetus for content creation has been lost somewhat.
2. It’s genuinely very frustrating to pour hours of effort and dedication into a project, only to sudden have few people even able to find and benefit from your research and content.
Long story short, we’ve both lost the motivation to keep plugging on as we’ve lost both the satisfaction of seeing plenty of people viewing our content, and then financial bonus that came with that.
We’ve collected hundreds of comments and emails over the past few years from readers thanking us for the helpfulness of the site. But to Google none of that matters, as at the end of the day Garage Dreams is just another website that can easily be replaced in search.
So, what next for Garage Dreams?
The original focus of the site was on buyer’s guides. We still maintain our buyer’s guides are some of the best around. We WANT people to find them to help avoid buying lemon cars.
However, as the Garage Dreams domain name/URL is “poisoned” from Google’s perspective, there’s not too much point continuing here.
What we are looking to probably do is:
- Split off buyer’s guides (existing, and any new) onto a new website
- Split off product reviews (existing, and any new) onto a new website
- Keep Car Facts/news here, and shift focus onto creating and promoting content via social media channels rather than Google search
Let us know what you think about the plan. And if you do find this site helpful, then leave a comment as maybe enough “thanks for the help” comments will help Google to reconsider their incorrect classification of this humble website.
