Hi, Milo,

Ah, good question!

I usually create a child theme of the theme I’m using, then modify that theme’s header file so that it has an HTML element that I can style with CSS.

But sometimes, I forget 🙂 That’s the case with the case study website. So I inserted it with a CSS pseudo-element. If you know your way around CSS, you can do this, too, by going into the “Customize” option for your theme and inserting the disclaimer through CSS.

This tutorial shows you how! ::before | ::after | CSS-Tricks

Have fun,

Dim

would like to ask, how did you implement affiliate disclaimer at the top of the pages?

Thanks and keep this interesting journey up to date 🙂

Thanks, Fred!

Good question. I’m not going to build or buy new websites for the foreseeable future.

First, I want to see how Google change their SERPs to incorporate Bard. Based on what they showed, my take is that they will generate longer, more detailed featured snippets for most queries.

If more and more Google users get a good enough answer directly in the SERPs, that’s going to eat away at the organic traffic that online publishers like you and I get to their properties — and that’s a problem, as generative AI and LLMs will only get better at giving helpful, factual answers.

Second, to me, this brings back memories of Facebook. Many years ago, I was a partner in a media company that had Facebook pages with millions of fans. That way back when Facebook pages still had 30-40% organic reach. We took that traffic for granted… until Facebook closed the tap.

If content becomes a commodity, and with text generation tools, it’s on the way of becoming such, and websites get even less organic space than they do today, that may cause many indie that rely on Google as their primary source of traffic to go out of business after a few years.

There will always be room for websites — and somebody needs to keep creating the content that search engines crawl and now aggregate. But the way that these websites get traffic and earn revenue may change.

My question, and the one that only time will help answer, is to what extent?

Are we looking at a 15-20% traffic loss across the board, but better, more targeted traffic being sent to publishers after Google and Bing have already given a high-level answer? Or are we looking at a major reduction in search demand because, let’s be honest, almost nobody these details reads long answers.

Until then, I’ll be growing my existing sites and selling off a few. Yes, I’m fooling around with this case study, the programmatic SEO case study, and an AI-only site that I haven’t written about anywhere. But I’m not investing in new digital properties in this category as I don’t have high confidence in the ROI that they can yield in the long run.

In any case, this is a great time to think about alternative traffic channels and alternative monetization means, such as paid newsletters or digital products, that can offset any losses in display ad earnings or affiliate revenue. New things come in quickly but change takes place slowly, so there should be plenty of time for everyone to navigate this new environment we found ourselves in.

How about yourself, Fred?

Dim

Here for the answer as well ?