As of April 2024, YourBassGuy.com is now apart of the Your Bass Guy (YBG) family and the two sites have merged together.
If you visit any page on Anglers, you’ll be redirected to the same page but on the YBG domain.
Actually… the two sites were never separate.
They’ve always been the same.
Same team, same content, and same business.
In January of 2023, the YBG team bought the domain YourBassGuy.com.
We did this because “YourBassGuy.com” is a heck of a lot more memorable than “Your Bass Guy”
It also encapsulates the content on our site in a better way.
Your BASS Guy implies only bass fishing.
However, bass fishing is just one segement of the content on our site.
We also write in-depth about:
Not to mention the copious amount of reviews we’ve done:
We’ve done these reviews not just on our site, but also on YouTube.
Needless to say, we want to be the one-stop shop for any angler, no matter which species of fish they are targeting.
So why are we going back from YourBassGuy.com to YourBassGuy.com?
Because Google, that’s why.
As mentioned above, we merged YBG into the YourBassGuy.com domain back in Jan of 2023.
But Google didn’t like the migration and that’s a problem because most of our visitors and traffic come from Google.
We get this traffic by writing a TON of content and then optimizing it via SEO strategies.
Our traffic has been down 90%+ since the move. That steep of a decrease in traffic also comes with an equally steep decrease in revenue.
We can’t sustain any longer.
Despite Google saying time and time again that 301 redirects and migrations shouldn’t be an issue, we’ve seen first-hand that this isn’t the case.
WooCommerce (an e-commerce platform for websites built on WordPress) recently had the same problem.
Their original website and business were on woocommerce.com.
They went out and bought “woo.com” as they felt it was better for their brand.
However, after 5 months, they are reversing the migration. Just like we are doing now.
Why?
Because clearly Google does not have migrations figured out.
We say all this because we’re disappointed and feel we’ve been mislead by Google.
Even after reaching out to several Google representatives, they have nothing to say.
We got one reply that they would “look into it” and then were ghosted after.
We keep seeing instances of Google killing small publishers, and they just don’t seem to care.
We’ve had to hit “pause” on all content creation for the past 6+ months and have had to let go of all writers.
You would think Google would have a little love for small publishers and businesses.
But they don’t.