u/Correct_Score_3330

As the title states, I had a Blog that was performing very well. We edited it to " make it better." We thought we were making it more informative, and we added a call to action in the middle of the blog. Well, Google hated what we did, and almost overnight, it dropped 80%. We let that ride for a while, but eventually, out of frustration, we just restored the previous page as it was originally.

That had no effect whatsoever, and it just remained the same measley baseline. Why is this?

Does Google hold a grudge, like: "This page changed, and it was crappy, and now nothing will ever cause me to forgive you," lol.

A competitor of ours buys domains from cheap hosting with the url being a target keyword. They write one AI blog on the page, link to themselves twice with varied anchors (including using competitor brand names).

On just one blog host, they have nearly 50 of these mini "sites." They do this with multiple cheap blog hosting sites, resulting in hundreds of backlinks from keyword dense, fake urls. I doubt any of these URLs get any traffic because they aren't real.

I keep thinking: Well, Google will catch on to this because it's been happening for over 5 years, but they just keep climbing in rankings, blowing everyone in the niche out of the water.

They have low DR. Less reviews (by a lot). For a long time, I could not figure out why they're out ranking everybody, Now I feel like this black hat tactic actually works for them, which is maddening and confusing because it's so transparently bad.

I have a 2022 specialized epic Evo expert. A few months ago, it started with a loud cracking noise that seems to be coming from the front end.

This cracking noise is very loud: Crack, crack. It'll go off a bunch of times and then be silent. It doesn't seem to particularly happen more going downhill or more hitting rocks, in fact, I can't really find anything that makes it happen more except that when I first get on my bike it doesn't happen at all. It takes maybe 15-20 minutes or more before it'll start its first crack.

It might happen five times during the ride or 47, who knows, there seems to be no Rhyme or Reason. The only clue I had is: once I thought maybe my headset was loose and I tightened it, and that definitely worsened it.

Due to this experience, I removed the entire front end. I inspected the steer tube and the frame. I removed the headset from the frame and cleaned it up on the outside really well. I put them back in the frame, all greased up nicely. I put the crown race back on. I have a split crown race, and I might have gone wrong here because I'm not sure if these are press fit: I'm pretty sure they are not as to my understanding that's the point of the split race.

So I put my bike back together and was pretty delicate, preloading the headset since it seemed to be very, very sensitive. I was so hopeful, but it made almost no difference whatsoever.

I had even put a little grease in between my spacers, which are a mix of carbon and aluminum.

It definitely is not the bars or the stem as these have been replaced with no change.

The sound is a very distinctive sound that reminds me of how carbon sound. It isn't a metal tinking or creaking noise it's a crack the way carbon makes that sound when you flick it.

As a side note, the back of my bike was also making a similar cracking noise, and it was the flip chip.