---
title: 'Google''s Latest Update Destroyed This Gamer''s $1M Business'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=eXQo1i0z190'
video_id: 'eXQo1i0z190'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 827
---

# Google's Latest Update Destroyed This Gamer's $1M Business

> Source: [Google's Latest Update Destroyed This Gamer's $1M Business](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eXQo1i0z190)

## Summary

Brandon, founder of Retro Dodo, shares how a Google algorithm update decimated his gaming publication's traffic from millions to 200,000 monthly visitors, turning a $1M business into a struggle for survival. The video explores his journey, his meeting with Google's Danny Sullivan, and his pivot to building a diversified media brand.

### Key Points

- **Retro Dodo's Peak Success** [00:01] — Retro Dodo generated tens of thousands of dollars monthly with millions of organic search visitors. Best month: couple million search visitors, $50,000 revenue (60% display ads, 15% affiliate, 10% YouTube, 5% sponsorships).
- **The Google Update Hit** [00:26] — Out of nowhere, Google's algorithm update caused an 85% traffic drop. People couldn't find the site even when searching directly.
- **Traffic Decline Numbers** [03:48] — At peak: ~1 million clicks from organic. Current: ~200,000 visitors per month. Revenue crashed, leading to layoffs of friends and team members.
- **Google's Invitation and Frustration** [05:18] — Brandon met with Danny Sullivan at Google to discuss search. He felt gaslit—Google promised improvement but traffic got worse.
- **Pivot to New Products** [06:39] — After his son's birth, Brandon diversified: built 'Handheld History' (sold 15,000 units), a modular pegboard display, events, merchandise, and sticker kits.
- **SEO Audit Findings** [07:31] — SEO expert pointed out wasted link equity from redirecting rumor pages to homepage. Suggested updating rumor content into reviews, similar to MacRumors' strategy.
- **Missed Opportunities with Rumors** [08:55] — Brandon deleted pages with rumors about unreleased games. Expert advised keeping them to accumulate backlinks and then convert to reviews after release.
- **MacRumors as a Model** [10:41] — MacRumors creates rumor pages early, builds backlinks, then updates to reviews. This generated massive search spikes and sustained rankings.
- **New Search Engine Project** [12:09] — Brandon is consulting on a new search engine that is unbiased, no ads, no privacy tracking, and allows users to prioritize sites like Retro Dodo.

### Conclusion

Brandon's story illustrates the vulnerability of relying solely on Google traffic. He now focuses on building community and diversified revenue streams, and is working on a human-centric search engine to help independent publishers.

## Transcript

gaming publication retro Doo his site was generating tens of thousands of dollars and millions of organic monthly visits our best month was a couple million search visitors a month organically it was an incredible moment
the little kid in me was basically collecting toys and gaming products for a living and we actually had a $1 million offer to purchase retro dodo you Liv in your childhood dream but out of nowhere Google took everything away from
him and his dream became a nightmare like many other businesses retro Doo has Google search algorithm people were literally searching for us and couldn't find us anywhere we're still down about 85% traffic do you feel like you were
gas lit by Google but to understand the full story we need to go back to where it all began from an early age gaming was a core part of Brandon's identity Lely look at that so this is
what started it all really the Christmas I opened up my Game Boy Color and received Pokémon Blue that was the moment that kind of took my life to another level because I would collect Pokémon I would go out on the streets
crusty Link cable and you couldn't see on the Game Boy Color so you had to be kind of stuff you know my parents didn't have too much money when we were growing up so the products and the toys and the games that we did get were very precious
to me so I wanted to keep them clean keep them sealed keep them in their box which my mother ended up throwing away my whole Pokémon collection mama I don't forget just took out half my help I know
although video games were Brandon's First Love retro dodo wasn't his first successful website I used to create sites in my spare time which led me on actually about camper it was predominantly started as a
YouTube channel so I was obsessed with them I used to travel around countries with my friends and camans and I managed to sell that brand in 2019 for about $100,000 which was obscene for me once I sold the caman site it kind of gave me I
Runway to build something cool and is my bigger passion Brandon and his editor and chief Seb began building retro dodo and quickly found an audience in a niche
reviewing Retro Gaming products but they needed to expand Their audience they turned to keyword research to discover what Their audience was searching for on the internet how to defeat the last boss in Sonic you know so new Pokémon game
came out for example what are the top Pokémon that people to catch them we would buy the games in test them on our consoles put hours and hours into these doing that we'd figure out the pain points in the game and and write guides
on it I think our best month was a couple million search visitors a month organically our best month we had I'd say about $50,000 in Revenue 60% of our Revenue was through display advertising maybe another 15% on affiliate 10%
YouTube and then 5% sponsorships and collaborations how did it feel when you were at at the peak of your success it was Unreal seeing the money come in and friends getting to work with some of the biggest gaming brands in the world that
I idolized as a child we actually had a $1 million offer to purchase retro dodo one of the primary reasons I didn't want to sell and it goes back to my first project I sold is the buyer actually destroyed that site over
optimized filled it with ads used AI garbage on it and now it's just completely eradicated off of Google and I was worried that the purchaser that wanted this brand would do the same the brand that I've been building for five
or six years it just didn't feel right handing it over to someone so it was a tricky one I think we had a couple of weeks to decide whether or not to take it and then the update
happened at the peak you said you were at around a million clicks from organic with social traffic and discover and where are you at today we are at around about 200,000 visitors a month now I was petrified to be honest with you like we
were being inundated with replies subscribers followers people saying how much they loved their site so why was Google not seeing this and actually penalizing us I looked back at the last 6 years and and kind of blamed myself
for it and it was panic I was looking everywhere for help I was looking online I was talking with friends and and everyone in the gaming industry that were friends that were doing something similar to me were all in the same same
boat it was like just a pure apocalypse on every level I was again naive SEO I thought it would come back in a few weeks a few weeks turned into a few months I kept my team and we were
burning through cash quite quickly but I was hoping because we were doing anything shady we were following Google's guidelines to the tea but it just never ever came back and unfortunately as the months went by we
had to get rid of my good friends that were a part of the team month by month so do you think that Google's guidelines are just a bunch of Lies I think Google's guidelines are correct and it's how websites should be built but Google
doesn't follow them themselves and they don't reward the websites that follow him in a personal video Brandon shared his frustrations about how Google algorithm changes have buried independent sites like his favoring
larger media companies Reddit and its AI generated answers while profiting from content created by smaller websites soon after he received an unexpected email Google decided to invite me in to
talk about the state of search I just pretty much called them out and Danny Sullivan from Google wanted to invite me in to talk about that privately in one-on-one with Danny he showed me around Google and then we sat down and
very open conversation with Danny and I believe he's doing the right thing in trying to learn how he can make the serps a better place and support independent Publishers but as we've seen you know know nothing's came from that
and traffic has gotten a lot worse since that meeting with uh with Danny so do you feel like you were gas liit by Google a little bit yeah it's almost like they're saying hey it's going to get better follow this donut on a stick
it's going to get better but actually it hasn't got better and I think they just need to be open and honest with what they say to Independent Publishers and also in their guidelines Brandon left his meeting with Google without answers
but he did gain fresh perspective January the 2 when my son was born that kind of changed everything for me I was putting my eggs in one basket that was the Google basket I knew I had to change and build a media brand that was
slightly different that had multiple Revenue sources and didn't rely heavily on one so this is what it will initially look like one of the products I want to build is a display called the dodo display where a modular pegboard system
that can show your cartridges and handhelds in a in a premium form factor now called a handheld history which is sold over 15,000 units that's 15,000 Gamers that we've you know produced a
book for and I do want to build an event every year in the UK that brings the your smaller scale stuff like merchandise t-shirts we're we're building out a um a sticker kit for kids as well so I think it's opened my eyes
to the exact people we want to pull through on our website we want to pull people through that we can convert into community members that will read our content for 5 10 15 years so I took a look through your site and I saw some
and potential opportunities you might be missing out on is it all right if I show you sure please yeah I'd appreciate that I looked at your site in HFS and I think building I don't think you've ever actually built links right no but I
noticed one thing that you're doing that is organically building some amazing profile did you build this link on Wikipedia or did that come from somebody has linked to you to your bestselling GBA games from Wikipedia
you've gotten links from The New York Times wire cutter here's another one from The Verge and Gadget NBC and you've gotten all these links so a lot of these links that you're getting
are based on the fact that you're actually testing new products very quickly and so what ends up happening is if we look at your best if we look at your best links and top pages if we look at from
the top here to the bottom here we're going to see where you lost your traffic and I don't know if this was intentional or not you yeah some of this is intentional yes so for example like you have a lot of these where it's just
coming out uh I don't know how big this game is but if we look here you got three referring domains there Kingdom there Kingdom Hearts another three Luigi's
Mansion seven but if we actually click on it it redirects back to your homepage okay I'd like to pick your brains here so we were producing content on games so we were producing content on games that were not out yet rumors speculation
kind of our expert opinions on it and I was under the impression that that's not what Google wants almost it felt a little bit clickbaity although maybe someone wanted our professional opinions on it but this kind kind of comes back
to the whole idea of who are you creating content for are you creating content for the user or for search and in my opinion users want to read about wouldn't have deleted it because what's happening is you're doing these great
reviews that nobody else is doing because like you have the expertise where you can make these predictions but then you just redirected them to the homepage and so these links that you're getting to these pages are just being
wasted now you're redirecting it back to the homepage when there's no relevance the homepage when there's no relevance from Luigi's Mansion to Retro doo.com another site macrumors.com so they like rumors on Mac products so these spikes
here all coincide they're all in September do you notice that oh these the iPhone releases are they these are the iPhone releases so Mac Rumors is really well known for these rumors but instead of 301 redirecting it they
create a page like macrumors.com iPhone 17 and then that page will be all about released people want to know about what are the rumors what are the new features that are going to come out and then once it actually gets released they update
the content to be an iPhone 17 review so now they buy the product and so rather than redirecting it to a homepage losing all the the link Equity killing the instead you can just turn those into reviews of the products that have
actually come out interesting if you look at some of their top keywords so iPhone SE they're ranking number three for iPhone SE so if you think about that the top of the serup should all be Apple Apple Pages Mac Rumors ranks here uh
they rank in position nine right now for iPhone 15 should you buy it this is what it's all about now the iPhone 15 all right and that's now a full-blown review it was probably released in September but they start creating this rumors page
on May 24th it's all about rumors and I guess they're just piling on all of the back links into that one article yeah cuz for they've accumulated like if we look in HS for iPhone 15 look at that massive
Spike and searches that comes in in there right imagine ranking for like number two or number three for Luigi's Mansion mhm and now your your reviews are getting read and as people read those reviews as they enjoy them they
discover your brand that's the initial seed that's planted which I think search does better than any other platform while it's true that Google's update caused retro Doo's traffic to plummet dramatically it also lit a new Fire
Within Brandon to fight for the underdog and build businesses with more in Integrity after your site got smashed you're now looking at job opportunities yeah so this is a really unique one I am potentially working with a company to do
some consultancy with to create a search engine that is unbiased no ads no privacy tracking and all of that to create a search engine that's actually you know authentic and puts the human first it's a big risk me doing that you
dodo I do believe it's a brand that's going to absolutely kill it over the next 10 to 15 years but I think for me there's a little bit more meaning in working with a company that's trying to build a real search engine that actually
you can actually customize yourself so if you really like retro dodo but just can actually click prioritize and it will push them higher up in the uh search results which I think is is a really cool feature that will will help
people get discovered do you think that small creators shouldn't focus on seo seo is still a small part of our strategy it's more kind of picking the searching for and assisting with that in a fluid and professional manner use it
to assist rather than to prioritize revenues yeah and I think that's actually an important point because the problem with the way a lot of creators approach search is they expect it to build some kind of community it's a good
way of of the initial Discovery but then from there you need to find ways to through an email address or something like that and then you can actually start nurturing and building that relationship I totally agree and I think
it's now Publishers roles to bring in those viewers with SEO and try and members that will follow you for a long period of time that's where the value is from Google watch our free SEO course for beginners right here on YouTube