London On My Mind 4-Year Report
[CASE STUDY]

I feel like I might be safe in saying that for all of us, we got into the business of blogging because we love whatever we’re writing about. Does that ring true for you? It certainly does for me.

My first blog – Valerie & Valise – is the result of my love of travel and my love of the act of writing itself. Every website since has been another channel to continue that writing but explore other subjects too; over time that has included splintering off different places (subniches) to cover on different travel blogs, including – of course – my favorite city on earth, which is the subject of London On My Mind.

I started LOMM four years ago in January, and it has been a real rollercoaster – not as dramatic as some, but also not as dire at this current moment.

While there have been moments in the past year where I strongly considered walking away from LOMM (as I have done with Discover Sausalito, Follow the Butterflies, and Great Plains Travel Guide – more on all that in a forthcoming post), I just really, really love London, love visiting, love encouraging others to visit, and don’t want to give up – it’s a much higher threshold that will convince me to do so.

Below you’ll find a recap looking back at this past year including those dark moments, and a few rays of light as this is one of the only sites I can say has recovered (partly) from Google’s “Helpful” Content Update (HCU). I hope it offers you a little hope if you’re still in the trenches.

What are these Case Studies?

As a reminder, I do case studies for almost every site I’ve created, at the 6-month, 9-month, and 12-month marks. Then I switch to every six months for the next year; you can expect reports at 18 months and 24 months. If a site reaches its two-year mark and I plan to continue writing, I’ll switch to annual reports. Here are the ages of each site and its current status:

• Valerie & Valise – 11 years
• Space Tourism Guide – 7 years
• Discover Sausalito – 5 years*
• Follow the Butterflies – 5 years*
• London on My Mind – 4 years (this post!)
• Great Plains Travel Guide – 3 years*
• Jordan Traveler – 3 years
• Eat Like Bourdain – 3 years

*These are sites I’ve retired and will be removed from the list going forward.

(Links will take you to the full list of reports about that site!)

Fast Facts about London On My Mind

Here’s a quick glance at the stats for London On My Mind at its fourth anniversary:

Date First Published	January 1, 2021
Articles Live (as of 1/1/24)	269
Publishing Cadence	2x weekly
Monthly Views (last calendar month)	35,171
Maximum Views (in last year)	82,335 (August 2023)
Google Traffic (last 12 months)	78%
Email Subscribers	999*

In the rest of this post, I’ll dive more into the history of the site and where I hope it goes in the year to come.

*I’ve reduced this list down to under the 1k threshold to save money on my email service.

History of London On My Mind

I’m assuming if you’re reading this, it’s because you’re vaguely (or strongly!) curious about any site that shows recovery from the HCU; London On My Mind is the only site I have that got hit and has ever grown in a meaningful way after.

The short version of the story is:

• the first 12 months (2021) of the site were a slog
• the next 18 months (Jan 2022 until HCU/August 2023) were incredible
• the next 12 months after that were completely demoralizing
• in August 2024, the site started to recover after the August Core Update

The site is nowhere near its peak – still less than half –, but is at least making enough to justify its existence and my focus.

If you told me four years ago that I’d be really happy with a site getting around 30,000-40,000 pageviews per month, I probably wouldn’t have started this site; part of the plan was always to build a large-volume business that made money from ads and affiliates from that traffic. In fact, in August 2023, I decided to push my foot down hard on the gas pedal after seeing a fellow London blogger trying to sell her site for almost $1M.

(Sidebar: I actually inquired about buying her blog but she turned me down. She never sold and got hit by HCU and the March 2024 Core Update and has since stopped work entirely. I thank my lucky stars I didn’t buy that business because everything that’s happened since would have bankrupted us.)

Wen you put today’s traffic against the recovery that so many sites have seen, I’m grateful. It’s all relative – but it’s still depressing when you look at where the site once was, and what it could have been if not for Google.

Strategic Takeaways: F*ck Google

Even though LOMM is recovering, I could not be more ardent that I do nothing with this site – or any of my sites – in service or to try and gain the favor of Google. They don’t care about me, and I care about them only in so much as I’d happily sit in jail for punching Sundar Pichai in the face for destroying small independent publishers. We haven’t heard half of the horror stories from my industry, but I assure you, it’s worse than it seems even based on the dramatic stories you’ve heard from us vocal ones still trying to survive.

ANYWAY. My point is this: I actually blocked Google from crawling my site from June to August (2024); I only removed the block when the August (2024) Core Update began to see if anything had changed. For three months, I received zero Google traffic, and it was completely liberating.

(For context, I was getting around 17,000 pageviews in the months before the block, around 15,000 during the block, and am now around 30,000 now.)

By breaking the relationship/dependence on Google (rather than allowing them to dictate the terms), I regained control over my own business and strategy. It helped me learn to “stop writing for Google” (which I was never doing) and start writing the resources I think people need and which serve my business.

Now I can’t say whether that block actually helped my traffic recovery, though the data suggests it did (I went from 10k sessions from Google in May to over 20k in January 2025). I can say that it helped my mental health, helped me stay committed to a project I love, and forced me to get creative about making the business work even if Google someday pulls the whole rug out.

What’s Next?

As usual, I like to set goals and areas to focus for the coming year. Here’s what I’ve got for LOMM so far…

Keep Calm & Carry On

This is distinctly British, but my current strategy is to just keep doing what I’m doing. LOMM isn’t my biggest project for traffic or income, but it’s a respectable part of the portfolio, and I like working on it.

I’ve got a content strategy set up for 2025 and will just keep plugging away at it. If I see opportunities, I’ll go after them; otherwise, well, the header of this section says it all.

Keep Readers at the Forefront

Despite how much traffic I’ve lost, and how much more this site could have been, I still get occasional comments and emails from people thanking me for the resources I’ve written and continue to write. (This is where I can’t imagine abandoning my site – people deserve an updated resource if they find it!)

That motivates me to keep going: what I’m doing helps real people, even if travel feels trivial as the world burns.

I’ll continue to keep articles update, add new articles and resources that I think will be the most helpful, and see where we are in a year.

Finish my Neighborhood Guides Project

I deliberated a lot about what actionable goals I could set other than “just keep doing what you’re doing,” and I’ve settled on something I have real control over: an ebook/neighborhood guide project I started as a result of the HCU and wanting to clean up the articles on my site…

(I forgot to mention: I deleted about 75 low-performing articles during the year following HCU – that probably helped my site too. The same thing happened back in 2018 when I did a big content audit on V&V and was completely independent of Google’s f*ckery…)

While I have not sold a single eBook and might never sell any, I want to finish this project and get it off my mind/to-do list. It’s something – unlike growing my email list or Facebook group, which are also things I’m working on – that I have 100% control over.

Want to Try & “Recover” too?

Before wrapping up, I wanted to be explicit about the “strategy” I used that seems to have helped LOMM recover at least somewhat. If you want to try what I did, here are the exact steps you could do:

• Go through and delete 20-50% of your lowest-performing content.
  • Alternatively, you could save that content and turn it into ebooks to use as freebies or to sell.
• Block Google from crawling your site using Robots.txt. Give it a few months until the next core update is officially announced, then remove the b lock and see what happens.
• Just keep doing what you’re doing. You did nothing wrong to deserve being hit; your readers still need you, and you just may need to get creative about finding other ways to reach them.

That seems like plenty to be getting on with – for both of us –, what with my other sites and trying to figure out my next moves… Have any questions about how my London site has grown in the past three years or what I’m focusing on next? Let me know in the comments!