🤑 Million-Dollar Site vs HCU

Several years ago I was building a coffee site when I was approached about doing SEO work on a growing coffee site.

I declined since I was working on my own coffee site and thought it was a conflict of interest.

A few years later, that same coffee site sold for a cool million bucks. Mine had been abandoned long before that. 🙃

Today I was doing some research and came across this site, so I decided to see how it fared with HCU.

There Are No Winners

Did I honestly expect it to have survived? Kinda.

I thought I’d remembered it having some ecommerce stuff going on. Here’s the traffic chart in Semrush -

It looks like it’s lost all traffic, but Semrush says there’s actually around 7,000 monthly traffic left. After a high of a cool 962,900 monthly traffic.

We all know that these tools underestimate traffic.

Anyways, the site sold in late 2020.

I was wrong about the ecommerce component. But even good backlinks didn’t save this site - it’s a DR 72. Guess that HCU classifier is for real.

Site also has a YouTube channel, but nothing uploaded in the last two years.

An interesting look at a million-dollar site destroy by HCU, eh?

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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