More Details Regarding Insidus, Insidus Plus And Regular Nick

Firstly I'd like to thank readers for continuing to use our platforms as wecm begun a new phase in our lives. For those who don't know, two years ago, Google decimated the visibility of our website and in general affected our earnings. 

A bunch of colleagues had since then been grasping through straws trying to figure out where their next meal would come from. What I'm trying to is this issue is a site wide and I've seen a bunch of publications shut down from all of this.

 

Rather than me talking about this, I want to address the current status of all of my sites as I feel I owe you those who continue supporting us. It may feel like a long reed but it could be worth your time.

Insidus

Following the affects of 2024, news is no longer a priority it's more like a plot filler nowadays we mostly focus opinion pieces, reviews and question based articles which led to the inclusion of Featured Posts. 

Seeing as our other sites have content can still offer value as time progresses, that's what we shifted toward on Insidus. We will still offer news but long term that may not be the case and overtime you may see my investment here drop overtime.

I don't intend to shut down Insidus as its helped me overcome difficult moments in my life and I feel like I'm revisiting this situation with Featured Posts. If you feel like I've been inactive just know I'm probably working on stuff behind the scenes.

Most of the content on my site is now pre-published and it runs all the way to August and if I feel like I have enough I could develop some material for September and October even or even skip a couple of minds if I wanted to.

As mentioned, I'm still active but it might lessen with time.

Insidus Plus

A couple years back we operated a website with a similar name and we just revived it as a means to promote Insidus Television, my YouTube channel. It is home to the funnel of content across the web and is also less creative aspect of Insidus.

We write our own content on Insidus from time to time but Insidus Plus looks for content across the multiverse. It could serve as an extension to Insidus for certain news pieces and other content but that's as far as it goes.

The first time I started there was a lot of conflict with identity and thanks to my YouTube channel I feel like I know what I can do to address the differences. For Insidus, it's role is mainly to set reminders or offer extensions to existing content.

Regular Nick 

Firstly I like to apologize for those who relied on the initial Regular Nick site for taking time to address the situation. As some would recall, I had a site under this name and due to some tests the site went dark and it's less likely to be recovered. 

This is the reason a duplicate site with all its content had since been rolled out and I haven't been able to use the Regular Nick name due to pending issues with the initial site.

As for this newly launched version, my priorities here have changed instead of promoting it through social platforms. I opted to rather use Insidus and Insidus Plus for those endeavours the closest I am to doing it on socials would be Instagram and X.

Then there's something I want to try and do with the site think of this as the Featured Posts column on Insidus. I'm trying to make my workload on here less draining which is why I had been inactive.

Happy New Year To My Readers With An Important Message

I'd like to take the time to thank my readers as well as those on Insidus Television for your continued support. I'm still trying to recover from the ripple effects of a core update which has affected a lot of publishers like myself.

With that in mind, we're looking to undergo a content restructure of some sorts where the focus will shift mainly news and highlights - less copy and paste.

Another will be with our second website Regular Nick: Games, that won't be closing anytime soon but maybe there's a way we can keep both in the picture. I can't promise anyone that I'll be active on there as much.

For 2026, I want to try and rationalise on things here that could signal even lesser content or more of the same thing.

Insidus And Entertainment Inside Us Explained

After shortening the name of my website from Entertainment [Insid]e [Us] to just Insidus. It was discovered through a number of search engines that the name resembles Insidious (a horror film).

When users search for my site, Google and whomever it may concern usually regard Insidus as a spelling mistake for Insidious. To clear up any confusion, from now on will be using both Insidus and Entertainment Inside Us.

The decision for using our old name was based from internet searches and most of our readers are still rely on Entertainment Inside Us. To show there's no hard feelings we made it easier to find us on the search.

Major Restructuring Coming Soon

Last year, Google squeezed thousands of websites out of their search algorithms leaving them to go out of business if not scale back on content. As mentioned, we were one of those affected sites as we watch our traffic plummet in top tier countries and shift toward smaller tier markets.

Trust me when I say the struggle is devastating as a publisher to started out in the mid 2010s having all your recent content garner little noticeability while those you ranked on get snatched. It's one of the reasons I'm writing this announcements to all our faithful readers.

As we mentioned, there's other platforms (like YouTube) where our content continues to garner scale so we'll be moving some content. The remainder will still be distributed on the site but overtime it could garner scale elsewhere leading us to redirect them those platforms.

To keep everyone in the loop, we'll be attaching links across the site to the platforms we're engaging in.

Rounding Off 2024: Google Is Attempting To Kill Off Sites Like Insidus

 Before I knew HCU existed

By June of this year was when things changed at Insidus as I thought I was hit with arthomophic penalty which prevents my site for being reachable in a matter of days to six months. Part of me thought my ads were the problem as I had gotten complaints about that reduced it but still no luck.

So I went to Fiver and booked an appointment to have my site disavowed which prevents certain content from getting picked up through Google. I had somewhat duplicated content but this was mainly to update/expand previous articles so yeah that too was also a bust.

I can't recall when I discovered Google was the problem as I was focused on saving Insidus and at that point I was blowing my budget. In one of those encounters a phrase came up "Google Has Killed SEO" so when searching for that you come across a number of individuals with similar experiences as mine.

The introduction of HCU

It was through these experiences that I learnt of Helpful Content Update (HCU) which traces back to September 2023 for most of those individuals. This was basically a algorithmic update that targeted spam and low quality websites and the result came at the price of the livelihoods of several publications.

There was even a whole brawl between affected sites and SEO experts blaming our ads (which are provided by Google BTW) and content. Some of these sites to have been hit range from travel, fashion, gaming and entertainment so for SEO experts to target us was a bit of an overstatement.

Firstly, there's several big publications already breaking Google and SEO guidelines one of which was to not have an ads/malware pop up like it forms part of the website. Some of these so-called experts were quick to justify to level the corruption and use their size as a defence mechanism to get a free pass.

Getting to the problem

In October, Google hosted a creators summit where 20 HCU affected publishers attended in the hopes to get some closure or at least some clarification on where Google stands as far as independent publication gets. The answer let's put it like this let's say you're going on a vacation and you have the one briefcase.

You can't take the whole wardrobe but only essentials you'll most definitely rely on this is where big brands stand over independent publishers.

It was made clear that my content and the ads curated by Google themselves wasn't the problem so who holds more power here SEO experts or the ones in charge of the problem in the first place (being Google). Being encouraged to continue making helpful content is difficult if your resources are limited and Google rewards those who steal them.

If I had to guess thousands of sites like mine where hit with this it may have to do with the rollout of Gemini, Google's attempt at being an answering machine. To top it off, an "improved version" is coming in 2025 most probably to kill off more websites from readers grasp.

To those who aren't being affected, ask yourself is Google doing you any favours by referencing cause if you were the malformed website why should I care about your existence if Google exists. Besides, Google was ousted for "stealing" images and there's AI infused search engines compensating publishers (Google is not one of them).

If 2024 has taught me anything don't put all your eggs in Google's baskets luckily I have a following on other platforms but sadly a large part of it is from Google so screwed anyway. Even if Google had to rewrite their wrong the trust has been broken from the September 2023 update or for me by June 2024.

At that time, I lost over 50% of my traffic and further updates led to an increase but not at the scale post HCU. As for my audience, most of the content is catered for South Africa yet they don't form the top 3 or 5 countries not even the rest of Africa it's mainly France, Hong Kong and European markets.

So how is Google able to get this audience into Insidus is unknown to me if all the keywords I ranked out even the global ones are dead.

I don't care where my audience comes from I'm glad to know there's people out there who care but if you're a running Marvel based website you are expecting a majority be Marvel fans but this is not the case. I can't just change my content if the current setup yields results something so called experts tell publishers.

Conclusion

As I brace for 2025, I will be making some minor changes to how things are run on this website getting it platformitized. Those following me and reading up on my stories know of some of these developments building up YouTube channel, merging Insidus Plus here and finding more sources of income.

Shutdown plans aren't underway as blogging has always been a coping mechanism for me built it with the little I had and can try to recover from that again.

Other publishers also hit with HCU 

Danteizm: Google has killed Blogger. Page is not indexed: Redirect error 

HouseFresh: How Google Is Killing Independent Sites Like Ours

Retro Dodo: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo And Other Independent Sites 

Giant Freakin Robot: The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot 

Ready Steady Cut: Ready Steady Cut has been destroyed by Google’s algorithmic extinction event and we have tried everything to recover

Google Has Killed Independent Publishers Like Us, What's Next?

As some of you already know, Google continues bleeding independent publishers dry with their latest algorithm update leaving only large websites to takeover the search engine alongside the help of other platforms like Reddit and Quora. But if I had to be frank, it's mainly large websites alongside TikTok and Threads that are killing us.

It's sort of reached this point where I had to reduce the amount of content going to this site from this point forward while thousands of others are looking to close and just "move on". Something I've read was that a convention was held by the search engine where various publishers affected by this issue attended.

For those relying on SEO agencies are wasting their time, it was made clear that our content wasn't the problem and the few that were fortunate to attend got the vibe that there's no recovering from this.

Below is the current state of various independent publishers 

Another algorithm update is on the way but from what I can only assume this will eat away a large part of the internet. With Google pushing hard on Gemini (AI), we presume they'll want to cut away more smaller websites like ours part of which are still have various pages being ranked within a query.

Now imagine being the only competitor in your niche and now these consumers hoping to find your content when searching the web will find zero results or worse run into another website duplicating your content only for them to also get delisted.

As it stands, it's best we just transition from publisher to content creator so we're focusing on YouTube at the moment and hopefully we can add more to the list.