Michael Lewittes came to my home on a Sunday to talk to me about his unique perspective as starting as a journalist and reporter, then owning his own publishing company named Gossip Cop. He had to worry about SEO when he started his own publishing company and built it up to a point where was able to sell that company. Michael grew up and still lives in New York City, specifically the upper east side.
Michael worked at various entertainment publishing companies both as a reporter and journalist, and as a producer, including the New York Daily News, US Weekly, Access Hollywood, E- News, NBC News and more.
The reason he started Gossip Cop was to fact check the gossip sites, tabloids, blogs, etc and tell the full truth about what is going on in the entertainment media world. I remember seeing Michael first in a Google hangout with John Mueller with him complaining about the traffic issues he experienced a few years into the site. He was hit by the Panda update and he had to learn all about SEO to get the site back in a position of growth and did excellent. He got some excellent free and top notch press about his site from top celebrities, including George Clooney, and that all came naturally and lead to great links and press. We briefly talked about how it felt to get hit emotionally and financially.
Michael then learned about SEO and he learned a ton of information online and read and read and learned and learned. The issue he felt with his site was that he had a lot of thin content that he had to deal with. His goal initially was about being first and accurate but that changed over time when he wanted to prove his site was better. He said putting out more content was leading to him to inadvertently that strategy was tanking his site. So he looked at his UX, design, and his content - and he was able to fix the UX and design quickly. But the content changes took a while but the strategy worked. They reduced the pages on his site, reduced the number of ads and bulked up the content pieces over a two year period.
You can follow Michael Lewittes on Twitter at @michaellewittes.
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