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CCN Shuts Down Citing Google’s Update As A Reason

Written by Jonas Borchgrevink, director and founder of CCN Markets and Hawkfish AS, the post elaborates over the reasons behind the decision. As per the post, following a June 3 Google Core Update, the firm has experienced a large drop off in traffic from Google searches, over 71% on mobile overnight, pushing them to take the decision.

https://twitter.com/CCNMarkets/status/1138096020066308096

Borchgrevink further notes that the levels have been low in the past as well, it is the addition of new members to the team made it difficult to continue to operate in these conditions on advertiser revenue. Citing the data from Sistrix.com, the post notes that other crypto news site such as CoinDesk saw a 34.6% drop, while Cointelegraph reportedly saw a 21.1% drop on mobile as well.

Borchgrevink adds that the CCN team will be moving to HVY.com, a news platform for journalists. He also notes that the Google update has not just affected crypto sites, specifically mentioning British tabloid The Daily Mail, who has visibly seen a large drop as well. Some speculation doing the rounds online that “clickbait” headlines are behind the loss of visibility for The Daily Mail, which reportedly lost half of its organic website traffic.

The announcement went on to note the reasoning behind certain sites losing visibility is not being determined:

“Unless someone – anyone – who actually worked on the June 2019 Core Update at Google explains what is going on, all we can do is to ‘guess, speculate, and experiment’ as far as our bank accounts allow us to.”

Founded six years ago, CCN was initially going by the name CryptoCoinNews, before rebranding.  Borchgrevink writes:

“If Google thinks that CCN, all of a sudden — remember, literally overnight —, is bad, then why not give us the chance to understand the why and give us a way to change before any major update. Instead, we are kicked in the teeth overnight with zero knowledge of what we have done wrong, impacting a team of 60+ people. 6 years of work is evaporated.”

However, the post concludes with a list of demands to Google that including giving three-month’s notice of expected changes from Google Core Updates along with an explanation of what a company can do to change if it falls into a risk zone for losing traffic and having national governments create apolitical task forces to inspect search engine updates for “ the conservation of our democracies, our Freedom of Speech, our Freedom of the Press, and our Freedom of Information.”

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