I Deleted Half My Website and Google Was Like: ‘Respect.’

Cutting the Noise: How Re-Pivoting vonhauerland.com Launched It Into the Algorithmic Stratosphere

Okay. Deep breath.

This isn’t one of those slick blog posts where someone pretends to “humbly learn from failure” and then drops affiliate links to their productivity course. No pitch decks. No “launch strategy.” Just a raw dispatch from a very real (and slightly obsessive) art nerd who recently tore down parts of his own website, burned a few sacred cows, and ended up watching the damn thing take off like a Falcon 9—except without the Musk.

This post is about that.

Step One: Not a Facelift. Not a Makeover. A Full-On Re-Pivot.

I’d been feeling it for a while. vonhauerland.com, this weird hybrid of steel sculpture, speculative paleontology, and space obsession—it had lost its signal. It became too much. Too many branches growing in too many directions. Artist collabs, protest t-shirts, merch that felt more like a distraction than an offering. Somewhere along the way, the site stopped being about Galactic Fossils and started being about… everything and nothing.

And when that happens? You circle back to the core.

This wasn’t a mild “touch-up.” This was bonsai with a katana. I cut off everything that didn’t directly pulse with the reason I started this thing in the first place: the raw thrill of making mysterious steel artifacts that feel like they’ve been dug up from an alien prehistory.

Step Two: Elon Musk Is Officially Banned

Yeah. This one needs a whole section.

Somewhere along the way, I realized a strange thing: Elon Musk was haunting my website. Not literally (though I wouldn’t put it past him). But his name, his shadow, his noise—it was leaking into the blog posts, the t-shirt slogans, even the hashtags. Like every other pixel of the internet, I had accidentally become part of his amplification machine.

So I killed it. Deleted every mention, every parody shirt, every article that used him as shorthand for “future” or “dystopia” or “tech madness.” Same with Trump. Not because I want to be apolitical. But because I want to be clear. I’m not here to be a reaction channel to billionaires. I’m here to build a universe out of steel.

Step Three: Goodbye E-Shop, Hello Focus

The online shop? Still exists. But no more “sneaky merch.” No more trying to trap people browsing art into buying a protest sticker. That felt like I was betraying my own vision. Galactic Fossils are not product bait. They’re not a brand extension. They’re objects meant to exist. Period.

And about those collaborations? Look—I love artists. But as one friend bluntly told me:

“Dude, I couldn’t even find your stuff on your own site.”

Oof. But he was right. So I pulled back. Trimmed the elitist gallery fluff. Cut the “networking for the sake of it.” von Hauerland is a signal, not a station.

And Then It Happened: The Noselift Before the Rocketship

So… I made all these brutal cuts.

And what does Google do?

Immediate nosedive.

Search traffic cratered over one weekend. It was the kind of drop that makes you want to curl into a fetal position and rethink your entire creative existence.

But then—like something clicked—the numbers shot up again.

I swear it felt like the Google Search Console understood what I was doing. Suddenly, the keywords people were using to find the site weren’t junk phrases. They were real. Relevant. Stuff like “alien artifact sculpture,” “modern steel fossil art,” “tabletop objects from imagined worlds.” These were my people landing on my site. Finally.

Evidence: One Screenshot to Rule Them All

I’m not going to bore you with ten charts, but here’s the big one:

Impressions doubled in under a week. Clicks up 140%.

I’ll drop the screenshot below in another post or update, but just know: this isn’t some SEO guru trick. I didn’t optimize keywords. I didn’t pay for ads. I just stopped pretending to be more than I am. Or less.

Galactic Fossils Are Moving

Here’s the cherry on top: one Galactic Fossil just landed in Los Angeles, right in the middle of a protest-fueled summer. Another is on its way to Sweden. These aren’t marketing victories. These are proof-of-soul victories. A few months ago, these people didn’t know von Hauerland existed. Now they found it. And they felt it.

That’s the magic of re-pivoting. You stop screaming at everyone—and start whispering to the right ones.

Final Thought

This isn’t a startup fairy tale. It’s not a TED Talk in disguise. It’s just one sculptor who got tired of the noise, pressed the mute button, and found the volume knob for his own frequency.

If you’re out there building something—art, code, memes, whatever—maybe the lesson here is this:

Prune harder than you think. Focus sharper than you feel. And watch what happens.

vonhauerland.com is alive again.

See you in the fossil fields.