I started building niche websites in 2020. Within a few months, Google became the single biggest factor in my professional life. Not my skills. Not my ideas. Not the quality of my work. Google.

When 80% of your visitors come from one source, and that source can change its mind overnight with zero explanation, it shapes everything. What you write. How you write it. What you build. What you don't build. It's not a tool you use. It's a landlord you try to keep happy.

I never went down the hardcore SEO rabbit hole. Didn't build link networks or spin content or buy expired domains. I dabbled in some grey-hat stuff early on — nothing dramatic, mostly things that existed in the grey zone between "Google says don't" and "everyone does it anyway." But the core of what I did was straightforward: write genuinely useful content, design it well, actually test the products I reviewed.

For a while, this worked. My main site, Start24, became the best resource in its niche: WordPress and web hosting reviews for Dutch beginners. Honest ratings, beautiful design, well-structured guides, fun to read. Start24 was and is a good site. Readers told me. Competitors knew it.

Core updates came and went. I wasn't obsessively checking Search Console during them — that's a level of anxiety I don't need — but I was generally relaxed. Good site, good content, good rankings. The system seemed to work.

Then last year's core update hit, and Start24 got nuked.

Not "dropped a few positions." Nuked. The kind of decline where you watch your traffic chart and wonder if the Y-axis is broken.

The money hurt. But what hurt more was pride. Honor. The quiet assumption that if you do good work, the system recognizes it. That assumption died in about a week.

I build things I'm proud of. When the best site in a niche gets algorithmically buried while thin affiliate spam sits comfortably on page one, it doesn't just hurt the business. It makes you question whether quality ever mattered at all, or whether you were just lucky for a while.

I tried things. Deleted content that was less directly relevant — the standard recovery advice. There was a small recovery starting in January. Enough to think maybe the system could still correct itself.

Then in February I went further. Way further. I rebuilt Start24 from the ground up. Interactive content. Custom tools that actually help people make decisions. Radical honesty in reviews — not "every product is great in its own way" but "this one is genuinely bad and here's why." A free WordPress video course. A free WordPress theme I built myself. Dramatically better design across the board.

And Google's response? Keywords dropped. Traffic fell. Again.

I made the site significantly better — more useful, more honest, more complete — and Google decided it deserved to rank lower.

At some point during this process, something shifted.

I stopped caring.

Start24 was getting traffic through other channels — paid ads, direct visits, email, social. The site was doing fine. Not because of Google. Despite Google.

And once that clicked, the weight lifted.

Google occupies more mental space than you realize when you depend on it. Every piece of content you write, there's a voice in the back of your head: will Google like this? Is this the right keyword density? Should I add another section to match the top-ranking pages? It's not conscious optimization. It's a low-grade anxiety that colors everything you do.

When that goes away, you feel it immediately.

I still check the rankings occasionally. Not out of hope — out of curiosity.

Because at this point, Start24's trajectory is genuinely fascinating. The site keeps getting better. The rankings keep getting worse. How long can the best site in a niche keep dropping? What does the chart look like when quality and rankings move in perfectly opposite directions?

I'm going to keep tracking this publicly. Not because I think Google will notice or care. But because it's a useful data point in a larger conversation about whether Google search still works. I have some thoughts on that. They'll get their own post.

I write what I want now. Not what I think Google wants. I design pages for readers, not for crawlers. I add features because they're useful, not because they might improve "time on page" or "topical authority" or whatever the SEO community has decided matters this quarter.

The work is more fun. The results are better. I sleep well.

Google is the biggest source of web traffic on earth. It matters enormously. It's also a terrible thing to build your life around.

The liberation isn't in pretending Google is irrelevant. It's in arranging your life so that its decisions don't control yours. Diversify your traffic. Build an audience that knows your name, not just your URL. Make things good enough that people come back without being told to by an algorithm.

And then, when Google buries the best site in a niche while promoting garbage, you can watch it happen with amusement instead of dread.

That's the 100x improvement. In how it feels to wake up and do the work.

This is the second in a series about Google and search. Next up: why I think Google search is fundamentally broken — and why they may not be able to fix it.