Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched.

At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could work together. They invited us because the content was incredibly useful for their visitors and they preferred our calendar over the official one for ease of use.

So clearly, our site was adding value for the target audience we had in mind. We were also consistently getting visitors through different search engines that were looking for the info we provided. The number of visitors was growing consistently and pretty much all the feedback we got was positive.

In March, Google rolled out a new algo which all but completely removed us from search results. Out visitors dropped about 80% and growth has disappeared. What was a fun project that we spent many hours on is now a waste of computing resources.

I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.